


Umbra

by contrequirose



Series: Astrological Arcanum [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: AU branching off of episode 48, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Any trigger warnings will be posted on a chapter by chapter basis, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Political Alliances, arcane science, canon typical depiction of violence, daemon AU, full list can be provided upon request, if they come into play later, magic is cool - freeform, relationships remain untagged as of now, this is a full out au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2020-03-07 04:37:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18865864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contrequirose/pseuds/contrequirose
Summary: They don't have a good grasp on what's happening, here. The beacons, the portals, the gates, and shackles, and politics, and lies. They don't know what they're doing, they don't know what the portals mean, and they sure as hell don't know what's happening. Not at all.What they do know, is that they and their daemons are going to get out of this alive, even if they have to drag themselves and each other kicking and screaming out of the darkness and into the light.(under repair - check back soon!)





	1. Treading on Towering Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Knowledge of His Dark Materials is not necessary to read this fic, although it will help. This is a complete AU of Critical Role. Things, concepts, and character backgrounds may not be the same as in canon. These changes do have a cause, and a purpose, so bear that in mind if things seem a little wild at first.
> 
> Large portions of the dialogue in the first few chapters, before the divergences from canon really come into play, are taken directly from episode transcripts. I do not own these portions of dialogue. It just ended up being the best option to fit this situation. But this will only be the case for about the first couple of chapters, before things go all topsy turvy on us.
> 
> There's a list of daemons mentioned within the endnotes of each chapter, as well as any applicable trigger warnings and terms that could be confusing.
> 
> And hey - enjoy!

 

The Lavish chateau - while, lavish, as the name implied, was not exactly his first choice for a studying location.

To be fair, he hadn’t been able to study and transcribe spells in a calm environment since those precious hours he and Frumpkin had managed to gather in the Cobalt Soul’s libraries in  Zadash, as hard won as that opportunity had ended up being. But here - it would be fine, because this room is quiet (relatively, because he can still hear the bustle of carts on the streets outside and the movement of cutlery and dishes downstairs, but nowhere is ever truly silent when a person is as hyper attuned to noise as he is), and the floor that he’s spread his books and papers on is convenient, and the cushion he’s stolen from the couch is comfortable enough.

 _Would be_ is the important operator, here, because the presence of Jester’s dog, larger now than he was before they had departed on their impromptu pirate journey, is more of a hindrance than the boon Jester would take it for.

It’s not that he hates dogs.

(Maybe - maybe that, but only a little bit.)

He doesn’t hate Nugget, at least, but the dog is loud and annoying, because he wants to be played with, and there is only so much attention he can ask his daemon to indulge the fey dog in before he grows annoyed with him as well.

Frumpkin - he looks up, to check, and is greeted with the sight of his daemon, claws bared, balancing precariously on top of the dogs back, a frantic stream of sylvan pouring out of his mouth.

“ _If you drop me, I swear - Nugget, do not blink, this is important -_ ” his daemon says, in hissing Sylvan, and he muffles a chuckle behind his palm at - whatever is happening, over there. He’s not sure he understands what, not yet, but Frumpkin doesn’t seem too put out. More joking, than anything.

With Frumpkin keeping Nugget at bay, it makes it easier to concentrate and lose himself in the repetition of copying spells into his books, ink forming sigils and glyphs with a steady hand, neat in contrast to his scrawled handwriting detailing the somatic and material components to the side.

The others had left two hours ago, and he hasn’t gotten as much work done as he would have liked.

His own fault, not the dog’s, but even Frumpkin’s attempt to entertain him failed to keep Nugget from continually creeping up behind him and drooling on top of his head.

He’s sure that his hair looks a right mess, to match the general disarray and scruffiness of the rest of him.

The pages continue to blur into each other as he writes, pausing only to wring out the cramps in his hand before re-dipping his pen and continuing, transmutation and evocation spells stumbling out of his memory and onto the pages of his spellbook.

Caduceus pops in at some point with Clohria perched precariously on his head, mentioning a tower and dinner and “You should eat, Caleb, really -” but he just shoos him away, too busy focusing to spare the concentration or energy required to interact with the others.

He has those sustenance pearls he took from the happy fun ball, and that’s more than enough to keep him going. No need to eat, when he was work to do.

It’s later, then, after the others have gone to sleep in the rooms that Jester’s mother has granted them and he is in bed with Nott and Cobal, both curled up and purring almost around his knees, that Frumpkin curls in close to his neck and whispers to him.

“The others are planning on going to that weird tower, tomorrow. They managed to get an appointment, or - a lead up to an appointment? I wasn’t sure. And I’m not honestly sure why we’re going to the tower to begin with, but it should be okay, I think.”

He peeks one eye open to glance down at the tips of his daemon’s ears that he can see, by his collarbone, and narrows it. “Did you catch all that from in the room with me? I did not think dinner conversation was that loud.”

There’s the faint pressure of a paw at his neck. “No, I just went to dinner. The snapper was really good.”

“Mm. Did Jester’s mother notice you there by yourself? We shouldn’t have her be worried about what kinds of people her daughter is making friends with -”

“She didn’t seem bothered. It was fine.” Frumpkin started up a low purr in his chest, and moved closer. “Besides, it wasn’t that far. Only like thirty, forty feet since I stayed by the door. Nothing extravagant, range wise.”

“Mhm.” He closed his eye again, and sank into the comfort of the Chateau’s bed linens.

Sleep takes them both.

In the morning, the lot of them are gathered around the table, sharing what fruits and breakfast meats Jester’s mom arranged to be brought up. He ignores most of the conversation, thinking still of the spells that he has left to copy into his books and musing idly about what could have been in the books he left behind in the ball while his friends were facing a dragon, while he had hesitated out of selfishness and a foolishness that had almost led to the demise of his friends, if he had stayed they could have died but if he had stayed he would know _more -_

“Caleb?” He startles, inwardly, and glances up from his unfocused gaze on the plate of food before them to the rest of the group.

“What - what can we talk about that’s going to get us in that door? Uk’otoa, the dodecahedron - we need a story to get past that fucking goblin man that’s keeping us from getting in, something that his master Yussah Errenis would find valuable -”

He blinks, confused.

“What - is this about the tower?”

Nott flapped a hand at him in a throwaway motion and Cobal bobbed up and down next to her plate. “We talked about this at dinner, you’re up to date. We need a _motive!_ ” She gestures with the butter knife to the side of her plate, and Fjord next to her scoots out of range, Tirley hissing slightly from her position around his shoulders.

“I wasn’t - mm. _Was -_ what is the purpose of our going’s there, the one that we aren’t telling him?” He glances around the table, and Beau just shrugs while Jester and Fjord share the same look of excitement.

“I wanna see the inside -” “I’m pretty sure we just think it’s cool,” they both start at the same time, and cut each other off.

Nott scoffs, and leans across the table, standing on the chair a bit so that she’s eye level with him. “I have an actual reason - a powerful mage? With access to magical _spells, and books -_ ”

“Are we - are we planning on robbing him blind?” Frumpkin asks, lazily drawing a paw over his ears.

“Maybe he’s really nice and wants to be our best friend.” Jester scritches Sprinkle under his chin.

The conversation sort of - devolves from there, with Beau and Caduceus going back and forth about whether the Blooming Grove’s corruption is more of an emergency that the issue of the attack on the Tri Spires in Zadash.

“There is a war brewing in the Empire, and it is going to spill south, that is not a lie, that is an inevitability, so I feel that we can talk to him, and - trust me, no one in this room is more curious about this tower than I am, but why are we doing this? Are we planning on going there, and slaying this mage, and stealing a book, or make nice conversation, and steal a book - what is our purpose?”

He listens to Fjord’s argument for mentioning Uk’otoa, which is a fair idea.

“I am curious, and Beauregard is correct, that is something that we could legitimately talk about without entirely spilling the beans about ourselves, but I am just curious, and I want to make sure - I’ve talked about calculated risks before, and I don’t want to run willy-nilly towards folly like we’ve done with the boat, I mean - we’re all standing here, but that was foolish.”

Beau nods, chin resting on her propped up arm. “Look, at the end of the day, this guy has access, right? Making him our ally in some way could come in use, even in ways we might not be aware of yet.”

Jester reaches behind Beau, and prods Yasha gently on the arm. Yasha starts, Vrokin’s fur puffing out slightly, and then relaxes, coming back to the conversation.

“What do you think, Yasha?” Sprinkle sits back on his hind paws on Jester’s shoulder and wavers in the air for a moment before falling back down.

Yasha looks tired, he notes, but she answers, “Well, I mean - do what you’re going to do, just - try not to get us killed by a wizard, please?”

Vrokin leans into her leg, and she relaxes into the contact.

He nods in agreement. “We just don’t need to be too pushy.”

Everyone around the table chimes in their respective agreements, and Nott, still practically standing on her chair, sits back down.

“We all have questions, and there’s a lot of unknowns out here,” her daemon starts out slowly, and Cobal ruffles his feathers before jerking his head back towards his person.

“If this person could check off just one of the boxes, then that would be worth it. Maybe we make an ally and he can check off more than one box - tell us about the dodecahedron, maybe -” Nott picks up where her daemon left off.

“Check off a bunch of boxes,” Fjord agrees, and Nott gives him a nod.

Caleb picks at the sleeve of his coat with one hand and makes a fist with the other, thinking probably too deeply about - mages, and trust.

“ _Ja_ ,” he starts, and the rest of his party turns to look at him, “Well, potentially he could turn us over to people that we are - that we are not interested in being turned over to. But I’m not -” and he ignores the knowing look Beauregard and Joeria are sending his direction, because he had meant the empire as a whole, not just his own _scheisse_ , “-I’m not saying no, let’s just be careful, that’s all.”

Fjord nods, again, and picks at the remnants of the eggs and bacon on his plate.

“Well, this guy is anti-Clovis Concord, so, I don’t know. I don’t think he’s -” and she’s looking at him, again, and he can feel Frumpkin’s fur start to bristle from his position around his shoulders.

Jester, at the moment, has a rare look of worry and seriousness on her face that descends over her good mood.

“I worry that he’s going to do something to you, Caleb, personally -”

“I don’t think so,” he reassures her, and the worry on her face dissipates somewhat.

It’s edging past dawn, now, but the conversation continues as they clear their plates and make the walk to the district that the tower pokes it’s length out of.

The district that this mage has made his home is interesting, in some aspects, in how it seems to be primarily a gathering place for merchants and sell swords avoiding the attentions of the Clovis Concord. Not a place that he would imagine a mage to make their home in, but the aspect of the Open Quay, that it is somewhere the Clovis Concord does not hold sway over, is probably part of its desirability. Although, he guesses, the Clovis Concord may be blocked from the Open Quay because of the presence of the mage.

It’s unclear to him.

The tower itself stretches to encompass his vision as they approach until it’s a massive structure looming right in front of him, taller by far than any of the more ramshackle tents and buildings that start a distance away from the base. No windows, no doors that he can note, but a handful of balconies remain towards the top, with twisted wrought metal standing out from the darker emerald stone that this tower seems to be made of.

It’s a beautiful stone. He should ask Caduceus what it may be later.

Though, to be fair, he may not know - Caduceus has a wealth of information on the colloquial names and uses for things, but lacks the scientific approach and taxonomy he’s used to. No fault of his, just a product of different upbringings, but he may be better served trying to look it up the next time he gets access to a library.

Once they reach the base of the tower, Jester finishes whatever she was joking about with Fjord, and knocks briskly on the exposed stones, Fjord taking mock notes as she does so.

They stand there for a second, and Jester nearly deflates before his very eyes with disappointment, before perking back up as they turn to the voice that resonates from above them.

“Can I help you?”

He looks up, and there’s a figure, adorned in dull gold robes, holding a cup of tea in one hand and a saucer in the other.

He loses whatever Fjord and the figure talk about as he studies them. They’re just out of his range to see real details, but he can make out the faint outlines of a longer set of ears and a rather judgmental gaze cutting into the menagerie of their group. An almost bored expression, but calculating.

Darker skin, so more likely to be from Gwardan than the elven cities in the north of the Empire. It isn’t enough to make him relax - not here, standing in front of a mage of unknown power, as they about to step into his domain, but it helps settle some of the panic prickling at his spine.

Caduceus is talking about his Grove again, pulling tea out from the pouches that hide in the looser folds of his pants, and he tunes back into the conversation.

The figure - and he’s going to go ahead and assume that this is Yussah Errenis, the mage of this tower - inclines his head towards Caduceus, and that same whispering voice presents itself once again to his ears.

“Choose one other, and enter,” he says.

In front of them, a door pushes its way through the stone and lingers there, dark wood and intricately carved vines along the sides.

His friends are muttering amongst themselves again, turned away from Yussah, but he keeps his gaze and attention locked on the mage.

There’s some arguing, some harsher words in Nott’s scratchy voice that he cringes at, internally, that are echoed in Cobal’s harsher tone and countered with Joeria’s disgusted scoff.

He glances down, for a second - the mage is still paying them his full attention - and notices his friends, cluttered in their little clump, talking about the dodecahedron like they are not in full view and observation of this unknown quantity.

Caduceus brushes off his pant legs and heads towards the door, looking back towards Beauregard with his intentions clear. She nods, serious, but looks to Caleb first, and he gazes back, one eyebrow quirked.

“Give me - give me Frumpkin,” she whispers, and he’s already shaking his head before she finishes her sentence.

Frumpkin shakes his head from his perch on his shoulders and Beauregard just scowls at them.

“C’mon, dude -” he keeps shaking his head no, and Joeria bares her teeth just slightly before padding towards the door, Beauregard following after shooting him a glare.

The door closes behind them, and then sinks back into the stone.

Yussah, above them, gives a nod and then he, too, disappears, and they are left standing in front of the tower.

Whatever is happening in there, it’s nothing he can influence from out here.

Fjord and Jester and Nott are all arguing about something, Cobal screeching angrily and Tirley hissing and Sprinkle speaking nearly as loud as Jester herself, but he ignores it in favor of taking out the romance novel he had purchased some time ago and starting to read through it. Nothing he can really do but wait, from out here, as much as the waiting tears a hole in his brain with worry for his companions.

Frumpkin reads over his shoulder in their usual position, and he just faintly notices Yasha settling in and sitting on the ground nearer to him then the argument happening, Vrokin curled in a black-furred lump in her lap.

He’s halfway through the novel - it’s nothing special, but the descriptions are especially good in this one, the clothing in particular - when the conversation/argument/improvisational theater session Fjord, Jester, and Nott were conducting cuts off, and he closes his book with a sigh.

When he looks up, Nott is glaring at the door that has just reappeared, teeth bared and crossbow cocked, and Fjord has his falchion summoned and is dripping seawater onto the cobblestones.

Caduceus’s head pops out of the door as it peeks open, Clohria perched once again on his head, and gestures for them to come through.

“Our host is aware of our positions and otherwise. I would ask that everyone -” and the glance that he directs towards Nott is not judgmental, per se, but it is a warning, “- try and be respectful of the space. Try not to break anything, steal anything, or otherwise.”

They follow him inside, and he trails at the edge of the group, anxiety once again pushing at the edges of his mind. Frumpkin clings a little tighter to his shoulders.

Inside is - cozy, in a way that he wasn’t necessarily expecting. There’s a set of couches with a small table in the middle, covered in burgundy upholstery, where Yussah and Beauregard are already sitting.

The mage glances over at them, gaze lingering on the others in turn, before he meets Caleb’s eyes.

He breaks the contact, shifting his focus to a spot just to the left of the other man’s face, and pulls his arms behind his back, fingernails biting into the palm of his hand.

Yussah’s daemon is draped over the couch that he is sitting on, and is a massive gray wolf that’s nearly black in coloration save for the lighter patches around the muzzle and ears. They stare at the group, and stay motionless on the couch.

Yussah gestures them in, closer, and as they move towards the couches the door shuts on its own behind them.

“Welcome to my chambers.” His head tilts, and he glances once again across the group, eyes sweeping in a wide arc. “Now that we’ve gotten some conversation underway, I would like to know who I am speaking with. You are all - what? Who?”

Beauregard sits up, slightly, Joeria’s ears perking up alongside her, and she nods. “The Mighty Nein.”

Yussah nods. “Very well.”

Caduceus makes a slightly startled noise, to himself, and starts to gesture towards the rest of them, but Yussah cuts him off.

“Don’t - don’t even attempt. You are?”

Fjord stands up straighter and meets the mage’s gaze. “I’m Fjord, and this is Tirley.” His daemon waves her tail a bit from her coiled position around his neck, scales gleaming in the light from the chandelier.

“Beauregard.” “And Jo.” Joeria’s longer legs settle in against the couch at Beauregard’s feet.

“Nott -” “-and Cobal.”

Yussah’s gaze turns to him, and he nods, barely.

“Caleb Widogast. And - Frumpkin.” He winces, slightly, at how his name sprouts like dirt from his mouth.

“Jester Lavorre, and this is Sprictis, but his name is actually Sprinkle.”

Yasha leans against the wall by the spot that the door would be, arms folded and looking discomfited, Vrokin sitting at her feet.

“Yasha,” she says quietly, “And Vrokin.”

Yussah’s gaze alights back on Caduceus, and the firbolg gives him a slow smile.

“And I’m Caduceus, and this is Clohria. Again, it’s a pleasure.”

Yussah nods. “I am Yussah Errenis, and this is Shione. I am the owner of the Open Quay, and I have been a practitioner of the arcane arts, in seclusion, for over two hundred years. Now, you -” and his gaze once again rakes over their group, and Caleb barely restrains the urge to flinch back, nails sinking deeper into his palm, “- carry with you something that is _very_ dangerous, and I would very much like it to stay here, because the longer it is on your persons, the larger chance there is of you misusing it and destroying yourselves, or it falling into the hands of someone who should not have it. That sphere is more than dangerous, it is a weapon, in the right hands.”

Jester leans over the back of the couch, cape brushing the top of Beauregard’s head, and frowns exaggeratedly at the elven man. “We almost died in there.”

“Exactly.”

Caduceus locks his hands together around his teacup and sighs, still focused exclusively on Yussah. “I would ask, just so that it doesn’t get me into trouble with my compatriots that I convinced that honesty and forthrightness was the best policy -”

Yussah cuts him off, mouth set in a firm line. “Should you wish to come and discuss, or see it, or compare notes on our experiences, you know where it is.”

Caleb misses what Caduceus says after that, because the mage’s daemon is staring directly at him, and the anxiety that he has been pushing down throughout this meeting is starting to bubble at the back of his throat, caution writing itself in the lines of tension that he can feel forming in his body.

Yussah seems to ignore whatever Caduceus is saying as well, because his eyes are firmly set on his face.

“You,” the mage says, and he wraps long slender fingers around the teacup in his lap.

The fingers that were already biting into his palm dig in a little further, the pain anchoring him to this moment and keeping the worst of the panic at bay.

“It looks like within your coat you are holding tomes. Are you a practitioner of the arcane arts, yourself?”

He nods, slowly, and Yussah continues, “Have you the capabilities to transport your compatriots via circles of arcane nature?”

He sinks back on his heels a little bit, considering, and when he speaks his voice masks the panic pressing at his mind.

“Via circles of arcane - teleportation circles, you mean?”

What is this, he doesn’t ask, biting his tongue.

(Powerful people so rarely tolerate questions.)

“Yes,” Yussah says, and the mage leans back against the cushions of the couch he is on, one hand reaching out to pet his daemon.

“Not as of yet.”

Nott, across the room from him, glances between him and Yussah and her eyes gleam with - something.

“But he learns very fast!” She throws a hand towards him, and he bites back the grimace that threatens to cross his features.

“I may, perhaps, have something like that, but at the very least I do keep such a circle, reserved for the select friends I keep.”

Curiosity burns in front of the panic, for a moment, and he grabs it with both hands. “Here in your home?”

“Yes. So - as part of our trust, of me keeping this sphere, you would be granted the capabilities, once you are able, to return here with your friends. You would have an anchor on the coast, and you would be under my-”

Yussah stops to consider something, his head tilted, before continuing on, “My protection when you arrive. Does that seem like a fair trade, those who seek friends and allies?” His voice is faintly amused.

His friends voice their agreements, around him, and he tunes back out of the conversation, mind still locked on the teleportation circle. If they had that - it is a while yet before he can cast that spell, pages upon pages of papers and inks that he needs to prepare, but it would be a ticket out of the hairy situations that they seem to bumble their way into, a way to visit Jester’s mother and continue to avoid involving themselves with this war.

When he focuses back in, a question on the tip of his tongue, Yussah has the happy fun ball in his hands, and he watches as it disappears into the folds of his robe.

“You have some knowledge of where that leads?”

The elf nods. “And the mage it once belonged to.”

“You know him personally?”

Yussah’s eyes narrow, just slightly, but his face remains impassive.

“No, not personally, but there are few in my circles that have not heard of his exploits in the past.”

Sprinkle, on Jester’s shoulder, chimes in, “Was he a bad guy or a good guy?”

Yussah spares him a glance, and says, “At a certain level of arcane practitioning, morality becomes a bit ambiguous, but to the common man, I would say probably not a very team player.”

He would agree with that, based on prior experience.

Power tends to corrupt people, as unavoidable as the tide creeping in, and magic is no outlier to that truth.

—

Yussah calls him, “Sad One,” and he barely blinks, because it is a truth that he doesn’t have it in him to deny.

They discuss they dodecahedron, around him, and he puts in his two coppers from time to time, as his friends angle for power that they don’t understand and tread closer to danger then they realize.

Nothing that Yussah tells them confirms anything, only reinforcing what they already knew, which is that it is something they do not and will not understand at this venture.

Eventually, Yussah sets down his tea cup on the table and stands, his daemon slinking off the couch and standing at his feet, reaching his waist at the shoulder.

When he gestures for him to follow, he does so, and pushes down again the panic that flared like banked coals at being alone with this mage.

The stairs are darker, dimly lit, and continue up for a flight and then two and then three, curling up in a spiral around whatever other rooms form the middle of the tower.

Yussah leads him into a door, back into the center chamber, and when the door closes he is left in darkness.

The room is cold and silent and pitch black, no windows, no light from the crack under the door, and no sound except for the slightly ragged edges of his own breathing and Yussah’s paced breath somewhere in front of him.

A moment later, a bright blue rune erupts into light above his head, and the chamber glows, illuminating the runic circle that forks its way across the floor.

Teleportation circles require a year of continuous casting to be made permanent, and it speaks to Yussah’s strength as a mage of his arcane status to have one within his own home that he has inscribed himself.

He takes in the sigils and rune script within the center with a careful eye, storing them in his memory as he makes a slow circle around the runes. If he memorizes those, the key to this circle, he can teleport here once he manages the transcription of the spell into his book and has the power for it.

It is - a great gift, an expression of trust that he finds suspicious, coming from this mage who owes them nothing and to whom they have barely told anything that he did not already know.

When he finishes memorizing the runes - a minute and six seconds later, exactly, Yussah is staring at him and Frumpkin, a considering expression across his brow.

“A quick learner. Where did you train?” His voice is calm, steady, but in his mind it’s accusative and harsh, a question that he is duty-bound to respond to.

Frumpkin’s claws prick the skin of his shoulder as his daemon shudders, and he struggles to keep his mind present in this moment, in this tower with blue bright light and a mage that he neither knows nor understands.

“Mostly on my own, to be honest. For years,” he lies, and his fingers rub against the rougher material of his coat cuffs within his sleeve.

Yussah gives him an approving glance.

He swallows down bile in the back of his throat, and continues, “It was not - It was not my intention to bother you here. My friends are very curious.”

“That they are.”

“It was fairly obvious, to me, that this building - this building was owned by someone of great skill.”

Yussah tilts his head, and the daemon at his side mirrors the motion, ears pressed back along their skull.

“It is designed to keep people like you out, but sometimes, tenacity makes for - interesting breakfast conversations.”

Yussah’s daemon blinks their eyes at him, the blue light catching the glints of gold in their eyes.

“If I may ask - Beauregard asked you to send your daemon in, alongside her and Caduceus. Would that not have stretched the boundaries of your range?”

His voice stays light, but his eyes narrow, pressing into him.

Frumpkin’s claws dig in a little deeper to his shoulder. He welcomes the pain.

He keeps his gaze in turn focused on the circle on the floor. “We have - a long range, proportionally, than the others do, and I am capable of four-eye. It is a useful skill, and one that my friends have come to rely much too heavily on.”

Yussah hums in the back of his throat.

“You had no way of knowing if this tower was just the outward appearance, and the rooms within were a demi-plane. If she had taken your daemon in, you may very well have died from the separation.”

“That would be - that would be why I refused. I actually thought it was a - a very bad idea to come here.”

Yussah looks amused, almost. “It was. But you came anyway, and look where you are.”

“I sometimes follow my friends places that I shouldn't.”

“That might one day get you killed. Or may one day get you what you seek.”

“Well, my apologies on my group’s presumptuousness. I hope - that we haven’t made a grave error, here today, and if we haven’t, I hope to earn that trust that you have mentioned.”

Yussah inclines his head. “I’ve lived quite a long while, in comparison to you, and the only reason that I have lived this long is I have made allies. I followed them into sometimes stupid, unnecessary circumstances. Many of them died helping me. Many of them I outlived. But I would not be where I am today if I didn’t at least trust in the power of others.”

His hands are shaking, just slightly, the faint echoes of pain from his arms pulling and feeding on his anxiety before fading into the background pain of his stretched daemon bond, constant and thrumming and hurting. He blinks, and manages to get out, “That’s good advice.”

He misses what the elven mage says next, too busy pressing his nails into the skin of his palm while his daemon’s claws continue to prick into his shoulder, points of pain that wash away the half-remembered past in favor of the present.

“I’m sure you have much to do today.” He manages, and blinks, turning his gaze back towards Yussah.

The mage nods, and with nary a gesture or a word the light in the room goes dark, and he feels for the wall with shaking hands before making a cautious descent down the staircase.

His group is still downstairs, sitting once again on the couches and enjoying whatever biscuits Yussah had summoned before taking him upstairs. He takes one, on his way out, and his friends follow behind him.

It tastes like streusel, buttery crumb and spices that he hasn’t tasted in over a decade.

The others, once outside, press him for answers that he does not have.

Outside of that tower, away from the darkness and runes and knowing gaze of that mage, his anxiety fades to its usual background thrum and Frumpkin’s claws stop pressing so fiercely into the skin of his shoulder and neck. It’s hard to even get the words out, amidst their prodding and poking, but he manages to convey how lucky they are not to be dead and that is enough for him.

They walk back towards Jester’s home, making plans to travel towards Felderwin - he is glad that they are heading there because he knows Nott is worried about it, even if she claims not to be - and they agree on another day in Nicodranas, to give Jester more time with her mother and the rest of them time to gather themselves before setting once again on the road back to the empire.

In the back of the group, he pulls Beauregard closer, and snaps his fingers so that Frumpkin appears of the ground in front of him, ignoring the stretching pain of his daemon bond as he does so.

“Just for - for the future, Beauregard. He said two, not three, and while Frumpkin is not - not typical, for a daemon, he is still a daemon and still easily noticed as such. That was not a good idea - but I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Beauregard looks down, and kicks at a rock in the road. She doesn’t meet his gaze when she looks up again, and he’s thankful for it. He’s had enough of eye contact for the day.

“Caleb - I didn’t lie to him. Not - not really, anyway, so believe what you want.” She and Joeria walk faster, to the front of the group near Jester and Sprinkle, and he stares at them as they walk away.

That night is filled mostly with him spending as much time as possible transcribing spells and his companions around him preparing for the longer journey.

When they leave in the morning, Jester’s mother steps out of the Chateau to say goodbye, long furred and enormous black leopard daemon staying cautiously by her side and flinching back from anyone who comes to close. She threatens them to keep Jester safe, and they all promise.

The road back to the empire in uneventful, beyond the scrutiny at the gates, and they ride in the cart, taking turns between sitting and walking alongside it, daemons clinging to shoulders and backs or taking the moment to feel the dirt beneath their paws and feet and scales. It’s eight days to reach Trostenwald, eight days of clear weather and cooler skies, of giving the romance novel that he finished to Jester and watching Nott refine oil in the back of the cart.

One of the nights, two days after Jester had sent a message to Beauregard’s mentor and received on in turn, he borrows Beauregard and leads her away from camp a bit, Frumpkin padding at his heels.

He grabs her shoulder, the movement familiar and comforting, and continues to look past her at the woods around them.

“I was - very brusque, in Nicodranas, with you. I - we are sorry. I felt very exposed with that man.”

Beauregard huffed, deep in her chest, and Joeria comes and settles around her feet, touching noses with Frumpkin for a moment.

“With a man like Yussah - if he wanted to find us - not me, but the rest of you and your daemons, he will, and I do not know _nearly_ enough about him to trust his allegiances or his motives or his words. Neither did you - none of us did.”

Beauregard's face twists, and he plows on, words dropping like flies out of his throat.

“Beauregard - there are people who would flay me like a cat if they could get their hands on me, so -”

“Did he say something to you, something about your past, when you were alone with him?”

“I - no.” His brow furrows. “But he was hard to read.”

Her gaze is calculating. “You think he saw you? _Saw you_ saw you?”

“I do not _know_ , Beauregard, and I don’t - I don’t like not knowing. I like traveling with you people, and I don’t want to take unnecessary risks, so. I’m not telling you what to do - I would never do that, believe me, Beauregard, but for me to stay here, to stay with you people I can’t keep poking my head above obscurity because someone will see me and find me and cave in my skull, or my daemons skull, or your skulls because you were simply with me and there -”

His voice grows fainter as he rambles, a slightly rocking starting as he fingers his coat cuffs and the anxiety that he’s been suppressing since that meeting comes rocketing into the front of his mind.

“That - that man in Rexxentrum, he would spread my entrails on the floor if he could get his hands on me, and I have factored that fact into how I live and hide and present myself for five years. I look over my shoulder because I fear that, and I fear now - I fear how close you all are, how close you are to him through me. And I want you to _understand_ , Beauregard - I don’t people very well, It’s been a long time since I had a lot of practice, but I need to be careful and if we can’t do that then I need to _leave_.”

Joeria places a paw on Frumpkin’s back and glances between the both of them, long muzzle frowning in her canine manner. “Do you have to go, or do you want to go. Because that’s what I’m hearing here, that you don’t understand that _we are your friends!_ We are here, we are trying to help you, willing to help you -”

He glares at the coyote and Beauregard both. “That is beside the point - if I care for any of you at all, and that man in the north knows where you are, he knows he can get me. If he finds us, if he finds me, you will burn alongside me.”

Beauregard places her hand against where he’s braced himself on her shoulder and shrugs off his hands, placing her own on his shoulders. “Caleb - unfortunately, you don’t get to choose who cares for you. That’s not a choice you get to make.”

He groans, because that isn’t - “That isn’t - Beauregard, we are talking around each other. That is not the point that I am arguing - I am saying that if we are going to be here, if we are staying together and close and _friends_ , we need to be careful.”

“Caleb, we can’t do anything without talking to people, without putting ourselves out there. We can be careful, but Caleb - I don’t like not knowing just as much as you do, but in order to know things we have to break away from being just careful.”

He swipes a hand over his face. “Just - persons like that one in that tower.”

“I thought you would be excited. I thought - Caduceus and I, we did a good job. I thought you would be so fucking stoked about this gods damn tower -”

His mind is running circles around his words, because she doesn’t understand and he doesn’t understand how to make her understand how dangerous that was, how things could have gone so poorly in that tower, how they could have all died if he had done the wrong thing or blinked the wrong way, how Ikithon would burn them all to get to him and his daemon -

“You know - in the, in the abstract, I was, Beauregard. But the problem with friends is that you have to care about them.”

He breaks from Beauregard’s hands on his shoulders and wanders away, turning from her and her daemon, Frumpkin padding silently at his side.

He ignores Beauregard’s shouting behind him, and just keeps walking.

Once he’s enough of a distance away to not entirely wake his friends, the entire campsite of sleeping peoples and daemons alike, he screams to a tree, anxiety and panic and terror seeping out of his mouth and into the world, and then walks back to camp, sets his dome and his wire, and falls asleep.

—

Trostenwald is the same as it was last time, minus the undead problem, and they don’t even stay for a full day before making another two day’s journey to Alfield.

In Alfield, Bryce is there, harried but still welcoming, their daemon directing the soldiers around them with flaps of their brightly colored wings. The news of the attack on Felderwin is concerning and makes Nott draw in on herself, worry clouding her features, her daemon’s feathers clasped tight to his body. He knows, yes, that she is from there, in some sense of a word, that her clan is based around the rivers there, but he is - worried. She hates her clan, she hates them fiercely, and he knows she wants to check on Yeza - at least he thinks she does - but some part of him worries that this attack is a harbinger of worse things to come.

Felderwin is another three days travel from Alfield, and the closer they get the more Righteous Brand soldiers they see. Even closer, they start coming up on farms, fields burned and raked the ground, families whose livelihoods were torn asunder by the attack. The town itself is chock full of military patrols, wandering with purpose amongst buildings charred and blackened, rubble and ruin. Nott leads them towards somewhere in town - he assumes where her alchemist friend lived, when she knew him, although he doesn’t understand really how she knows where he had lived so closely.

He’s worried about Nott. She’s been quiet this ride from Alfield to here, drinking more and more, and in the cart now is veering towards being drunk, regardless of the time of day -

The flash of blue that he catches out of the corner of his eye has his breath stuttering in his chest, and he sinks lower in the cart as he watches an older elven man blur into existence near another elven woman, both adorned in terrifyingly familiar robes and faces.

Lady Vess DeRogna walks arm in arm with Martinet De’leth, her swan daemon making his way in the air above them next to De’leth’s snowy owl.

His friends are staring at him, concern crossing their faces, but he gestures for them to keep going, and slowly, ever so slowly, they pull away from the two elves and head around a corner.

He lies down in the cart, and clutches Frumpkin to his chest, and tries not to have a panic attack in front of his friends.

It doesn’t make sense for either of those two to be here. If this had been an attack on - Zadash, maybe, or Rexxentrum, certainly, but not Felderwin, not this farming town. It’s impossible that De’leth is even here in person, given his duties to the king, but Lady DeRogna as well- why?

Why are two members of the assembly here, why are they investigating, are they looking for someone - looking for more Krynn operatives, looking for trouble, looking for _him_ , maybe -

He calms his breathing and stares up at the gray sky as the cart rattles its way through the streets of Felderwin, Beauregard staring at him with an unreadable expression.

(Though, to be fair, most of her expressions are unreadable to him. It’s not something he’s great at, even at the best of times, and Joeria shows more emotion than Beauregard does on a regular basis, and Joeria is a coyote. So - partially his fault, partially Beauregard’s tendency to under-emote, partially the fact that both of them are skilled in hiding their own emotions and do it maybe a little too well.)

 

Felderwin is larger by far than Alfield, larger than Trostenwald, even, but it’s still not the largest town. Within half an hour of entering the edges of the town, half an hour of passing by intact homes and broken homes alike, they’ve come to a stop in front of a building that Nott had pointed out, a pair of crownsguard a short distance away.

The building itself is wrecked. Burnt nearly to the ground, only the skeleton of a few walls and furniture remaining, and for a long moment Nott just stares at it, motionless.

She takes a swig of her flask and strides forwards, digging through the rubble with clawed hands, and they follow behind.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (eyes emoji at myself)
> 
> Daemons:
> 
> Caleb - Frumpkin (bengal cat)
> 
> Nott - Cobal (crow)
> 
> Fjord - Tirley (coral snake)
> 
> Jester - Sprictis/Sprinkle (crimson weasel)
> 
> Beau - Joeria/Jo (coyote)
> 
> Yasha - Vrokin (black arctic fox)
> 
> Caduceus - Clohria (giant flying squirrel, albino)
> 
> Marion Lavorre - Xerophia (black leopard)
> 
> Yussah Errenis - Shione (wolf)
> 
> Wentworth - Astra (malagasy painted toad)
> 
> Bryce - Lenora (red winged blackbird)
> 
> so hey folks! I know i said i would start posting this next week, but it's next week, right? weeks start on thursdays? yeah?  
> This au is Long, convulted, and hella fun to write. Chapters are currently averaging this amount, but really be warned - this fic is going to be a long haul, and there's going to be a sequel and other companion fics that don't fit into this one. But if you keep reading, or are reading this in the future - hey, reader. hope you're having a cool time.
> 
> Next chapter probably up on sunday or monday!
> 
> (also, not to make this the Longest authors note in a first chapter, but i have a writing tumblr now - https://contre-qui-rose.tumblr.com/ - where daemon lists, chapter updates, and other tidbits will be posted in relation to this fic)


	2. Crawl Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are stories to tell, nightmares to face, and a husband to rescue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Daemon notes at the end of the chapter! If you are reading this with no prior knowledge of His Dark Materials, some things may be a tiny bit confusing - I will answer any questions in the comments, and chapter four will have in-canon write ups of some of the concepts and ideas that I'm working with in this AU.
> 
> Enjoy the chapter!

 

There are alchemist’s supplies broken and scattered throughout the beams and bricks of what used to be a shop, broken bottles and vials scattered amongst the dirt that had blown in, some point after the fire. He finds a burnt toy, near unrecognizable, but no bodies. (Not yet, he thinks grimly, and if this encounter doesn’t end with his mind wrapped in the fog and cotton of one of his episodes he’ll be surprised.)

Cobal is flying around the tops of the burnt walls, peering into corners and broken beams and cracks. He drops something small and gold into Nott’s palm, and she clenches her fist around the button that he had found. Whatever fabric it had been attached to had been burned away, he surmises with a heavy heart.2

They don’t talk as they dig through the building, not until he hears Nott curse under her breath as she tries to get the basement door open, picks slipping in and out of the lock.

“Fuck - Jester?” She asks, pocketing the picks, and stepping back from the door.

Jester nods at her, and she lifts Sprinkle off her shoulders and places him on the floor, stepping back a few feet before sprinting towards the door and ramming herself into it.

It doesn’t budge.

Jester steps back again, and looks towards Yasha, who steps in line with her.

Jester and Yasha’s attempts to try and ram into the door don’t succeed.

“Nott, I don’t know why it’s not working. Maybe it’s - maybe it’s magicked?” Jester places her palm on the door, and frowns. Sprinkle climbs up the back of her skirts and lays himself around her horns, peering at the door.

“Why would it be - that doesn’t make any sense, Jester, it’s just a fucking basement.” Nott tugs a hand through her hair, claws catching on the braids and tearing a few pieces out along the way. She doesn’t seem to notice.

Jester whispers something under her breath, and then with a click the door opens, ajar now, a dark set of steps leading down beneath the house.

Nott stares at the door, takes another swig from her flask, and scurries through.

That was an arcane lock, then.

On a door to an apothecary’s root cellar.

He ties his leather strip around his leg and casts mage armor absentmindedly as they all head downstairs. This -

He doesn’t trust this, not this town, not this house, and not a basement being arcanely locked like that.

The basement is wrecked. Not in the same way that the shop above was, no burn or scorch marks, but wrecked all the same, broken glass and papers strewn about the room. There’s a single chest and chair, in the dead center of the room. The room is wrecked, but that chair is perfect and stable and pristinely set in the center of this room.

He moves in closer, and wracks his brain for memories of what this could be - it does not remind him of torture, not like this, not necessarily, but it was placed here after whatever wrecked this room came through. Someone was here after, was here and placed that chair -

While he was investigating the chair, Nott had pried open the chest and is standing in the room, mask around her neck, staring at a metal tripod and a vial of something golden and glimmering in her hands. She glances back up at him, and Cobal grabs it in his beak and carries the vial over, dropping it in his hands.

Reaching back down, she pulls up a long sheet of parchment and unfolds it, golden eyes scanning the page.

She keeps reading, and then looks up at him, and then back down, and then up again.

“ _As we start to invoke the beacon_ _with focused energies of different spectrums and sources, the effects unleashed are curious, and reach far beyond this laboratory. The astrological field -_ _”_

Astrological arcanum?

His eyes widen as he listens to Nott read off the letter, first at the mention of the beacon and then impossibly wider at the mention of dust.

He knows - he knows what that is. Impossibly, he knows what that is, but if the beacon is tied to that -

“- _sightlessly encompassed an entire portion of the town, with locals complaining of strained daemon bonds with no cause. Others, during different experiments, reported witnessing people and their daemons having inexplicable range increases, of men and woman with limited ranges suddenly capable of having their daemons move hundreds of feet in any direction. Others too reported seeing fully settled adult daemons shifting again, of temporary unsettlements. We de-legitimized these rumors by spreading a batch of molded fruit crop, but the stories show the power of what we are dealing with here._ _”_

Nott pauses reading, and her face twists. “What is this - what’s the beacon?”

Fjord takes the tripod looking object from Nott’s loose grasp and peers at the tip of it, where there’s space for something to be laid to rest.

He glances at Caleb, and jerks his head at him. “D’you think the dodecahedron would fit in this?”

He -

Hm.

“ _Ja,_ I think so.”

Jester takes the parchment from Nott and continues reading, her accent tripping over the vowels and consonants.

“ _Based on our previous experiments and extracted techniques from captured Krynn operatives, the abilities of astrological particles and arcane astrology within Xhorhas reaches far beyond our own understanding. Yet, even so, even with this magic being far outside the realms of the nominally accepted schools of magic -_ _”_

 _“_ The next part is unreadable, you guys, it’s just a burn mark.”

“- _… it proves extremely difficult to work with. Attempts to isolate aether using the beacon and its properties continue to prove time consuming, but still it is considerably less time consuming, this method, than the original harvesting process.”_

“What’s aether?” Nott peers at the parchment, frown firmly etched onto her face, and Cobal perches above her on top of her head.

He knows what aether is.

Knows, quite possibly, too well what aether is. They were trying to find a new source of it -

Who?

Nott picks up the parchment again and reads on. “ _In the past weeks, we have successfully distilled a vial of refined aether from the beacon. Eventually, based on this process, I should be able to have the alchemist gather aether from this plane even without the presence of the beacon, or any interference from the astral plane_ _… Word has found me of -”_

Nott’s voice falters, and then picks up again, reading faster and louder, her eyes flickering between the parchment and Caleb.

“- _of Trent_ _’s experiments with astrological arcanum, and of a possibility for those experiments as well to influence this process. I am eager to incorporate his findings into my work - Imagine - what could be accomplished by the assembly and throng should we further learn how to control the flow of dust.”_

Trent’s experiments.

(Him. His friends. The three years he spent under him, and the eleven years he spent as an insect under glass.)

His hands are shaking, he notes wildly, and Frumpkin’s claws are biting into his shoulder.

Nott hands the parchment back to Jester and paces, frantic energy burning in her. Jester scans through the parchment and pulls another piece off, this one more tattered than the other but still intact, still readable.

“ _The artifact that we have uncovered from within the beacon is also of notable news, though it is useless to us at this current venture. As previously reported, staring into the beacon for any length of time results in almost a raptured state of possibility. While I was within this state, my attention ensnared by the beacon_ _’s potential, my assistant took me for bewitched and cast remove curse upon the object. While this spell did nothing to break the beacon’s thrall, it did result in the eruption of an object from within the beacon itself. There was an alethiometer contained within this vessel. I’ve never seen one in person, but the illustrations at the academy do it no justice. However, none here, not even the alchemist, had any talent at reading it. If a person can be procured for the service of the assembly in regards to the use of this object, the impact it could generate on the war effort and our larger goals is astronomical. The Kyrnn have more control over dust than we do. But with this - with this we could even the playing field, and defeat those cricks once and for all in pursuit of our larger goals.”_

Sprinkle stares at the parchment, blinking in confusion, and then looks up to the rest of the group. “It just stops there. Caleb - Frumpkin - what’s an alethiometer?”

Frumpkin bares his teeth, and his claws sink just a touch deeper into his shoulder. “It’s - something from the Age of Arcanum. There aren’t supposed to be any left. It - it tells the future? Not really, but -” his voice peters out, shaking too much to continue.

Beauregard stares at them, and then at Nott, who eyes are narrowed into slits, still shining in the light that Caduceus generated in the room but shining with unshed tears and anger.

Shakes his head, to clear it, and starts again, “Nott - how does your friend fit into all this?” He asks, and Nott glances at the paper.

It starts to wrinkle in her clenched fists.

“I don’t know. He’s - he’s an excellent alchemist. They would need someone like that, but the Xhorhasians weren’t - they weren’t doing this. Someone else was. Right?”

He cuts a hand over his throat as Nott creeps closer towards his past, but she ignores him, eyes too bright and hands steadier than her voice.

“Your people,” she says, and he can feel his face blanch white as the room goes fuzzier along the edges.

Beauregard glances at him, and then back at Nott, and repeats, “Your people - “ before realization crosses her face and she jumps, eyes flickering between the two of them.

He can do nothing but watch as Nott continues on.

“Your people - your people were doing experiments and trying to find out and harness the power of these beacons -” she sees his hand gestures and throws her hands up into the air, Cobal flashing his wings as well above her head, “What?! It’s your people! It’s the people that you know and trained with!”

Beauregard cuts in, quietly, but still too loud in this tiny room, where the walls are closing in and he can hardly breath through the panic that surrounds him.

“It’s because they haven’t - he hasn’t, in terms of -”

“Well, fuck him -” Nott says, Cobal cawing above her, and he feels his hands shake and his muscles lock up and before he knows it he’s managed to vomit on the ground in front of him, Frumpkin pricking his claws into the back of his neck and both of them reeling on their feet.

He misses what happens next, but Caduceus is holding him as they climb out of the basement, Frumpkin being supported by Vrokin and Joeria as he stumbles alongside the group. Nott is still ranting to Jester and Beauregard, and his mind is whirring like cicadas in summer with terror, because Ikithon is involved with this, involved with his friends, and there are mages here that he knows of, that may very well know of him, know of broken students that ran from asylum -

He’s standing again on his own power when they press through the broken streets to a different house. Nott is in the front, disguised once again but different this time, a halfling woman with darker skin and braids, a dress covered in flowers and buttons and ribbons, more noticeable than anything he’s seen her wear in the past. Even her daemon is disguised, something she never usually bothers with, and Cobal’s typically black feathers are masked with a cover of shining purple and greens, grays and whites and blacks, of a typical pigeon.

He’s still barely aware of what’s happening around him when Nott knocks on the door, mind still wrapped up in his past and what it means for his friends’ futures.

But the words that come from his friend, his goblin friend that he has known for months upon months and would trust with his life, with his daemon, with his soul, bring him out of his mind and shockingly to the present.

“Edith,” she says, when the door opens to reveal an older woman, hair and skirts tied back, white muzzled daemon at her side. “It’s me.”

She sighs, and meets the woman’s shocked eyes.

“Where’s my son?”

For a moment, the only sound around then is Jester’s sharp intake of breath and the rush of wind through the streets.

Edith reaches up and rubs at her eyes, and then drops her hands and stares at Nott.

Her daemon leans a little closer into her side.

“I - I thought you were dead,” Edith whispers, and Nott gives a little broken laugh.

“I’m not. Let me see him right now -” and Cobal gives a coo from above her heard, just short of sounding like an actual pigeon but similar enough to make it work.

Edith’s eyes widen and she trips over her words, hands wringing the fabric of her grey stained apron. “My goodness - Luc? Luc?!”

Around the doorway, in this house, a halfling child - small, terrifyingly so, with shaggy brown hair and blue eyes and skin the same color as Nott’s disguise - peeks around.

“Yeah?” He starts, and then stops when he sees Nott.

He stumbles forwards a few steps, knocking his knees into the door frame. “Daddy said that the goblins killed you -” he says, a tear starting to track its way down his face, and Caleb is just watching this in silence, his mind whirring, his friends around them silent and shell shocked.

“No - they didn’t,” Nott says, brokenly, and she holds her arms out for a hug, falteringly, before letting them fall back to her sides as they just keeps staring at each other.

The child’s - Luc’s daemon flits up onto his shoulder, moth-shaped, and then twists into a pigeon, and then a mouse, and then a ferret that winds her way around his shoulders.

Nott hands him the doll of King Bertrand, hands shaking. “I brought you that, and other toys - How are you? Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

Luc blinks at the doll, eyes wide, and his hands close into a tiny fist.

“Edith says Daddy went away to help with the war, but I think she’s lying. He’s probably dead too, like I thought you were.”

He glances at Nott, and she’s shaking, fists clenched by her sides. Caduceus lays a hand on his shoulder, glancing at him in turn, and Caduceus just whispers, “Breathe.”

He takes a breath, and then another, slowing down where he had been breathing too hard, too fast.

He doesn’t understand.

“No, no no no - He’s alive. I know he is. Did they touch you?” Nott reaches towards Luc, but the boy just flinches away, daemon going mouse shaped again.

“No. Daddy sends me away when the mean lady comes by.”

Cobal flaps his way down and perches on Nott’s wrist, balancing precariously there in an attempt to get closer to Luc. “Gosh, it’s wonderful to see you, Luc -” he says, at the same time Nott says, “The mean lady? What does she - what does she look like? Who is she -”

Cobal hops to the ground and Nott stutters forward, sweeping up Luc in a tight hug and carefully avoiding touching his daemon, who goes moth shaped again at her movement and flutters a few feet above his head.

Nott’s voice is muffled where she has her head nearly in the child’s sweater. “Cobal and I, we’re so - so happy to see you and Korvit.”

She places Luc down again, and Korvit lands on his shoulder.

He doesn’t meet his mother’s (if she is - but what else could she be?) eyes. “The mean lady, with the pointy ears.” He traces up by his own ears, rounded as some halflings are, and points upward.

It’s cute. It’s heartbreaking.

“And the swan.”

His daemon flutters to the ground, and then in a second turns into a smaller swan, with an orange beak and black markings.

It is, terrifyingly, the same species as Lady DeRogna’s daemon, the same coloration, the same markings.

He exchanges a glance with Fjord, and the half-orc nods at him, solemnly.

Nott finishes up talking to Luc, and the boy half-runs back into the house, away from them. Edith sighs, pushing her hair out her face, and her daemon touches his nose to Cobal’s beak, where the crow (pigeon?) is still perched on the ground.

“Sorry, Edith.”

The older woman shakes her head. “I’m just happy to see you alive, Veth. I’ll watch Luc. Is there anything I can do… Veth, I’m sorry about Yeza.”

Nott stops her, and bites her lip. “Do you have - family elsewhere, out of the village?”

Edith shakes her head.

“Is this - I don’t - are there any strong - how do I,” she mutters, and Jester steps forward, an unnatural seriousness on her face.

“You need somewhere safe, for them, yeah?”

Nott nods, frantically, and looks back at Edith. Her hands fumble towards her belt, and then she practically throws a coin purse at the woman.

“Here - here, take this. It’s two hundred - buy new locks, or a better door or -”

Caduceus plants a palm on Nott’s shoulder, and squeezes gently. “You could send them to Alfield. I’m sure Bryce and Lorena would be welcoming.”

 Nott stares at him, eyes wide. “What if the next attack is there, I can’t -”

Beauregard says, quietly, “I don’t think they necessarily found what they were looking for, when they came here, but I think they didn’t find it and they might move on.”

Nott tenses, her hands clutching at the illusory folds of the dress she’s wearing. “I can’t just leave him here, Beau, not -”

“If you don’t feel comfortable with them here, you should tell them to go to Alfield,” Fjord adds in, and Beauregard nods at him.

“Look - Veth, wherever you go, whatever you want me to do - this is more than enough for us to get out of town for while. I want to keep your boy safe.”

Nott nods, and wipes a tear off her face.

“We’ll - stay here for now, and we’ll send you a message with, with what to do. And thank you, Edith -”

“He’s a good boy, Veth. You did good.”

She smiles, and her daemon nudges Cobal back out the door.

“Take care of yourself.”

 The door shuts, and together they are standing outside this intact home, only a few hundred feet away from the remains of the apothecary, staring at Nott in concern and confusion.

They move as a unit back into the cart - he lies down again when they spot Lady DeRogna and De’leth moving towards the apothecary, and Caduceus steers the horses off the street and towards the edge of town, moving somewhere on Nott’s whispered suggestions.

—

Caduceus drives the cart while they sit in the back, under a tarp, too close for his comfort and too distant in the same measure.

They’re just driving in a slow loop towards the river, meandering as to not draw suspicion, and Nott is sitting silent in the back, everyone staring at her.

Jester breaks the silence.

“Hey - Nott? What the fuck.”

Sprinkle nods in agreement from his position around Jester’s shoulders.

Frumpkin slinks off of his own shoulders and drops to the floor of the cart, jostling slightly with the movement of the wheels over the cobblestones. “That’s a good question, but - we just stole some very important things, it seems like, and the owners were going into that building - we need to leave.”

Nott growls, fierce but low. “We can’t - we can’t leave! I mean, you all can leave, but I need to stay.”

Caleb places a hand on his daemon’s back and he sighs, thoughts trapped and trembling. “Is this person you’re looking for - do you know? Do you have any ideas?”

 _“I don’t know_ \- I don’t know where he is, but I know that I need to look, and start looking now, and you all can go if you want, but…” Nott bristles, and Cobal settles in her hair as the illusion drops and both are back to goblin and crow.

“We’ll stay, Nott.” Jester places her hand on Nott’s knee and squeezes, gentle and cautious.

He glances around the cart, and meets Fjord’s gaze, eyes narrowed slightly, yellow and dull in the semi-darkness of the cart.

“Caleb, are you worried about another attack?”

Frumpkin’s fur poofs up imperceptibly to anyone but himself (and maybe Caduceus, whose eyes see too many things to count that others don’t), but he’s bristling all the same.

“What are you so nervous about?” Sprinkle stares at Frumpkin.

His voice is as steady as he can make it, and he says, “We were - we were being watched, as we came through here. Those people - we stand out, as a group. We don’t want to be noticed, not like that.”

Caduceus stops the cart by a bend in the river, the closet building now a distance away, only the faint outlines of fields, soldiers, and farmhouses visible in the fog.

Jester pokes Sprinkle and sits up, her hand slipping off of Nott’s knee.

“Nott - was that your son? Are you even a goblin?”

Nott - she just sighs, and he watches her sink down lower, knees coming up towards her chest.

“As a group - I feel like we’re united by dishonesty -” and she ignores the disagreeing noises Caduceus and Jester make, smiling faintly, “- some of us, at least. For me - it’s like an armor I’ve put on to protect you all from my past, from regrets, from me, and for others it’s like a chain dragging them down and keeping them there - but.”

She sighs, again. “What do you want to know?”

Fjord leans forward, but his mouth stays shut. It’s Tirley who edges her way closer to the line of his shoulder and whispers, “Are you a goblin?”

Jester chimes, “Is that your son for real?”

He has an inkling of where this is going, and he knows -

This isn’t going to be a story with a happy ending, or a happy beginning, or a happy middle, even.

And it’s not.

(It’s Nott.)

Nott tells them a story of a halfling girl and her daemon, of a halfling boy and his daemon, of childhood bullies and kisses on a dare and falling in love. Of collecting things, stamps and seals and stones and secrets, buttons and boulders and brilliant things. Of a son and a daemonling, tiny and perfect and theirs. Of a winter so harsh, of goblins that came and took them, of capture and confinement and escape -

The story of how Veth Brenatto and Cobal, halfling and pigeon, wife to Yeza Brenatto and Iridi, mother to Luc Brenatto and  Korvit - how that woman lived and loved and drowned and died.

Everyone - this group that they have formed, beaten and broken in their own ways but still together, still a group - stares at Nott (Veth -) as she keeps going.

“They brought me to this river and drowned me in it. I can feel the water, in my lungs and my ears and my nose - and I died, and then I woke up, and I was different, and Cobal was different, and it was terrifying and wrong and I died and woke up a monster, with a daemon that was barely recognizable.”

She rubs her nose, and Cobal clacks his beak. He says, lowly, “We died, and both came back different and wrong. We aren’t even - our range doesn’t exist anymore. When we woke up I could fly for miles and miles and miles and nothing would happen. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t pull - it’s like I’m not even her daemon anymore. I’m just - here, and wrong.”

They need to - her family is alive, or dead, but missing all the same, and they need to find him.

Caduceus brings up a good point, about looking into Yeza and how cautious they need to be in that - (more secrets, his mind whispers, and shoves that thought away) venture.

“I’m sorry - Caleb,” Nott Veth says, and he starts, Frumpkin’s tail twitching.

“I’m sorry for what I said before. I feel like - part of what we’ll need to do to find him is to know what he was doing before he was taken, and that involves you.”

Beauregard stares at him knowingly, and he can feel the weight of the other’s eyes on him as well.

“I don’t want to force you to do anything you don’t want to do, but - I need you. I need you to tell me what you know, what these people might be doing, or might have taken him to, or done with him.”

His attention fades in and out of the next conversation, too much focused inward on what he’s going to tell these people, what truth he can share without forcing their hand, without them leaving him in the dust where he belongs but is too selfish to drop him there himself, on photograms and dust and walls of steel and blades -

He blinks, and Caduceus is steering the cart through the fields of Felderwin, meandering and avoiding any other people on the road.

While he was - thinking, he guesses, though spiraling may be the better word for it - Jester has sent word to Bryce to expect Luc and Edith in Alfield, and Beau and Jester have discussed a previous lie surrounding her mentor.

The conversation has cycled back around without him, and while he was just - staring at the cart floor, at Frumpkin, at Veth (Nott? He needs to ask.) - Jester is staring at him, and Beauregard, and Fjord, and Veth is staring back.

“Caleb - we can tell you’re really scared, and that’s okay, to be scared. We just don’t know why.” Sprinkle slides down Jester’s arm and clings to her wrist as she lowers him onto the floor of the cart.

He -

(He can’t do this, can’t reveal himself and what he did and the fire that burns in his mind to these people, to his friends, his family.)

He takes a breath, and then another, Frumpkin’s tail lashing against the floor of the cart again, his own spine tingling with anxiety

“Your name was - Veth.”

Nott nods, and Cobal whispers, “It was.”

He nods back.

“Mine was, was - Bren Aldric Ermendrud, and.” Frumpkin places a paw on his leg, and he takes another shaking breath. “Lichion,” his daemon says, the name familiar on his cat’s tongue.

His friends stare at him in relative silence, and he continues on.

“I am from - from Rexxentrum. We attended the Soltryce Academy, and I was plucked by one of the Cerberus Assembly with a few others, and was being trained to do the kind of things that I fear may have been done to- to Yeza.”

(Not lies, not yet - not the whole truth - he is not from Rexxentrum, he is from Blumenthal, a tiny town with a tinier populace, but that is harder to explain, his life there that he destroyed)

“A lot of - a lot of big plans for me didn’t pan out, and I.”

He laughs, and Veth almost flinches back at the sound. “The others - they. They didn’t make it, neither of them, when it all fell apart. And we ran. We’ve been on the run for - for a long time, and I was tired of starving, and I met you, Nott, you and Cobal. I have just - I have been afraid for a long time, and two of the people in that town over there are on the Cerberus Assembly. And I - I know who they are, and what they do, and they would know of me, and I couldn’t take the chance of them seeing me, and finding me - but if those people are involved with your husband -”

He stops, words locking themselves in his throat.

Jester furrows her brows, face cautious, and asks, “Are they high up then?”

“One of them is the head of the Cerberus Assembly.” Frumpkin huffs, and curls up, tail crossing over his folded legs.

He ignores Jester’s swear in the background. Fjord is looking at him, and he asks as well, “Caleb - Bren. You knew that I wanted to go to Soltryce, you -”

He starts shaking his head as Fjord says his name, and then shakes harder at his words. “No that’s not - _nein_. The academy itself isn’t - there are good teachers, good students, brilliant ways to learn magic. But I was only there for a few months, and one of the Assembly - he taught sometimes, but not a lot - he. He took me and two others, in an advanced class of sort - I don’t want you all to be seen with me, because if they see you with me they will use you to get to me.”

Nott winces. “I mean… I don’t want them to see me either because they’ll kill me and everyone I’m with, anyone in town, so I think hiding is our game, now.”

He nods.

“You all - you met the man who trained me. Trent Ikithon, and - Flaris.”

Ikithon’s daemon was a massive white furred and antlered deer, that had been silent in every encounter he had with him. He was - terrifying, and wrong, but Ikithon had made them see it as a strength.

“I - I’m worried about your husband. I know the things that they can do.”

Frumpkin moves and curls in his lap, and with unsteady hands he unlaces the winding bandages that cover his arms, that he doesn’t remove unless necessary, that no one here has really seen him without, not until now.

Thin scars lance their way up his arms, and he knows without looking which ones contained which crystals, which ones ripped when placed, which ones became infected and nearly killed him later, which ones still hurt even now.

“He used to - he would put crystals in us, experiment on us, on the three of us.”

He looks up, and Beauregard is staring at him in horror, because - he’s told her and Nott parts of his story.

Of the torture and killing, of the graduation tests, of what -

Of what happened to Eodwulf and Astrid after Ikithon broke him.

But he hadn’t told them this part, because it had been too much then and it’s too much now but they need to know, need to know what Ikithon does to people, what he has plotting within him.

“What would they do? The crystals?” Nott asks, and he blinks, coming out of his thoughts.

“He was.”

He cocks his head, considering, and pivots.

“Do you all know about - about photograms?”

His companions around him nod. Photograms are - they had been invented as a way of studying astral particles - studying dust, nearly twenty years ago by an alchemist member of the Arcana Pansophical and some tinkerers in Tal Do’rei. They could take a painting, almost, of something happening in real-time and superimpose it over a canvas, but you wouldn’t see the details of anything - just outlines, dark shapes. What they did do was come out painted in swathes of brilliant gold, showing the flow of dust around a person, morphing around their daemon, around anything with conscious thought.

Those same tinkerers had morphed that technology to create photograms of people, not dust, some ten odd years ago. It had spread quickly, despite the expense and finicky nature of the process.

He doubted that any of them, save maybe Beauregard and Jester and himself, had ever had a photogram taken, or even seen a capture device, but the knowledge of it was fairly commonplace now.

“He was trying to make us stronger. And - he wanted to, to document it. So everything we did, he took photograms. This was just after they were invented. It probably cost - hundreds of thousands of gold, to do that. But he took them, during everything we did with the crystals and without, and experimented.”

He laughs, again, dark and edging on hysterical. “He wanted us to be strong. He thought - that the unwashed masses relied on their base instincts and the highest calling was to rise above the muck, rise above your daemon and dust and destiny and control the cattle for the good of all.”

Sprinkle whispers, “Caleb…”

Jester scoops him up and he scrabbles back to her usual position around the teifling’s neck. “He wanted you to - rise above your daemon? Is that why…”

(Why Frumpkin can travel miles away from him and he doesn’t blink. Why Frumpkin can still shift forms, if he concentrates and holds a transmutation on him, why Frumpkin can pop in and out of the Feywild with a click of his fingers, why there’s a constant pain behind his sternum that never goes away, like Frumpkin is at the edge of their tether constantly, even though it doesn’t hurt more when Frumpkin goes farther, doesn’t hurt more when his daemon isn’t even on this plane - that doesn’t grow lesser even when he’s the closest he can be.)

“No. I - _nein_. Well.”

Frumpkin pokes his head out from the crook of his knee and peers at Jester, ears twitching. “He’s responsible for that, yes, but it wasn’t - he tried to do something, and it failed.”

He nodded, faintly. “He wanted us to be - to be strong. So he tried -”

He stops again, because this is something that he didn’t tell Nott or Beauregard. Because, he said that - that Ikithon broke him, which was truth but not real truth.

His voice fails him, but his daemon’s does not.

“He tried to separate us. Not like how the Ashari do it, or some clerics do. He - it was -” he swallows, loud in the silence, and his voice comes out in a broken whisper. “There was a blade involved. I don’t remember it well. It was… painful. Extremely.”

He can hear the sharp intakes of breath from Beauregard and Fjord, the small gasp from Jester, the silence from Nott as she just stares at him.

Yasha’s hand comes slowly, as gentle as she can make it, on his shoulder, and he does not pull away.

“And he - he almost succeeded, as you can. As you can see. So I ran. But the others, they didn’t - they didn’t -”

He swallows down bile at the back of his throat, and finishes, “He succeeded, with them. And they weren’t - it wasn’t like separation. Their daemons weren’t just - their range did not increase, that didn’t happen. They were - severed. Gone. Empty,” and he stops again, Mollymauk’s memory ringing in his ears.

Yasha squeezes his shoulder again, and Vrokin leans carefully over and licks one of Frumpkin’s ears.

“I saw them, like that. He made sure I saw them. But I - I ran.” There’s things he’s holding back, eleven years of misery kept barely hidden, but they don’t need to know, not yet, not ever if he has anything to say about it.

He shakes his head again, to clear it. “We can’t fight these people. They are the most powerful mages in the country, possibly in all of Exandria. It would be a fool's errand to try and fight even one of them, at the point we are at now, let alone taking on the entire Assembly. We would be signing our own death certificates just thinking about it.”

“Why would they have - why Yeza? Why my husband? Don’t they have alchemists, in the academy, in the assembly - why some halfling with a talent for chemicals in a literal farming village? He wasn’t magic. He was just a chemist.” Cobal’s wings flash, the faint light in the cart glinting across dark feathers.

“I do not - I don’t know, Nott.” He considers, for a moment, and then starts again. “It has to do with the thing.”

Jester’s hands tighten around the straps of her haversack. “The beacon? The - the dodecahedron, right? That’s what the beacon is?”

“ _Ja_ , I think so. The letter - it said that he was producing aether, correct? The vial of it that we have in our possession, now?” He takes it out of his inner coat pocket, and holds it up in the dusty light of the cart, the liquid inside glimmering gold and vibrant, even while shadowed by the tarp and everything around it.

“What’s aether, anyways - why would it matter that he could get it from the beacon, why does it - why is he important? I mean, he was important to me but I don’t understand -” Nott’s voice grows more frantic as she spins off, and Cobal's wings stir the bird’s nest of her hair.

“Aether is - it’s how photograms can show dust, astrological particles. I don’t really know how… it comes from the astral plane, the same place dust comes from, and by refining it on this plane and then applying it to silver nitrate treated sheets exposed to light it can show the patterns of consciousness and dust flow around a person, or daemon, or item -” He says, mind recalling the words and books that he had read on the subject so far ago in the past, stopping only when he sees the looks on his companions faces.

“Sorry. It - it is used for photograms. I don’t know what else it can be used for, but it - the previous process would take weeks, and required planar travel and then a lengthy refining process. It was expensive. If it could be cheapened, in a way, made more accessible - I can see the assembly focusing on that. But I don’t know why they were using Yeza, or why - what an alethiometer has to do with this, or him, or you or me or any of us. It doesn’t -”

He sighs. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Beauregard takes in Nott’s almost frantic confusion and Jester, Fjord and Yasha’s similar states of uncertainty.

“Do you all know what - no, you wouldn’t would you, this is nerd shit.”

She clears her throat. Joeria sits up slightly, paws pressing into the floor of the cart.

“An alethiometer - it’s old, way older than pretty much anything else. They were either invented pre-Age of Arcanum or during it, but either way - pre-Calamity, at the least, and probably a whole lot older. They… hm. They don’t tell the future, not really, but they’re rumored to be able to, if you can read it, tell you a truthful answer to anything you can ask. What happened in the past, what’s happening now, the most likely thing to happen next, the truth of anything, almost - they read dust, somehow. Nobody knows how.”

She takes a long look at Jester’s haversack, and then cuts her eyes over to Caleb.

“Caleb, do you think - if the beacon the assembly had one in it, would ours?”

He wrinkles his nose.

“I do not know, Beauregard. I doubt it.”

Jester’s hands spring to life, and she rifles through the pockets of her haversack, pulling out the letter again. Her eyes scan the paper, and then she blinks, slowly and pleased.

“It says that they cast remove curse on it. And I - I have that spell? Normally I don’t have it prepared but I do today because I thought we might have to fight goblins and I wanted to be prepared for like, goblin traps? But it’s a good thing I did, because I have it prepared!” She singsongs, and sticks her hands back into the haversack - and then two hands, and then almost her entire face as she fumbles for something.

Her face pops out again, and she grins at the group, one of the handles of the beacon sticking out of the top.

“Jessie - wait -” Beauregard gets out, but Jester just grabs a hand around her holy symbol and starts muttering under her breath in Infernal.

They all stare, transfixed, as a golden pulse emits from the beacon and then -

Then -

Jester drops the beacon back into the box in the bag.

“Holy shit, you guys,” she says, and holds up a small circular device, golden and shining and intricately carved with hundreds of tiny sigils and circles on the lid.

She holds it in her hands for a moment, and then flicks the lid open.

When she shows it to the rest of the group, it’s almost exactly like the pictures he’s seen in books, in histories at the academy. The hands, tiny and thin as gold filigree in the center, four of them. The miniature pictures lining the edge, painted with a hair and so detailed he can’t even grasp everything they show, thirty-six of them in all. Three knobs on the side, to turn the needles to ask a question.

He knows - he had read one of the books of meaning, for an alethiometer, when he was bored at the cottage one terrible warm summer day. He knows at least some of them.

“Jester - may I?” Jester hands him the device, carefully, and he holds it in his palm.

With fingers slightly trembling, he turns the hands to three pictures.

The anchor - one of its meaning is hope, that he remembers. The globe, for politics, and distance, tied to each other. Alpha and omega for finality.

The most important part, the book had said, was to hold the question in your mind as you asked it.

With that in mind - he concentrates, blocking out Nott’s attempts at getting his attention, Jester’s excited chatter, Fjord’s quiet worry, Yasha’s anxiety, Beauregard’s watchful gaze, Caduceus’s distant humming as he drives the cart -

_Do I have a chance at saving my friends?_

He releases the dials, and for a long moment nothing happens.

Then - as he watches, the fourth hand of the alethiometer twitches, and then starts dancing around the edges, ticking at symbols and then moving on before he has even had a chance to count how many ticks it had given, hitting three and then four and then five and then six symbols in a row.

He blinks, disappointed even though he knew the chances - there have been cases, in history, of people being able to intuitively read the alethiometer, without relying on books of meanings and years of training and study.

It is not a surprise that he is not one of them. But it is - disappointing, all the same.

He passes the device to Beauregard, who explains how to try it to the rest of the group while he leans against the wall of the cart, Frumpkin kneading a paw into his leg.

This whole situation - Nott’s husband, her death and resurrection, the ties that it seems to have to Ikithon, to the assembly - there’s something that he’s missing, that they are all missing, something tying this together into a knot that he cannot find the end of.

One by one around him, his friends attempt to use the alethiometer, and one by one they pass it off to the next person. Nott just passes it when she gets it, simply handing it off to Yasha and continuing to mutter under her breath.

After Beauregard passes it to Fjord, scowling at the golden dials, she lays a hand on Joeria’s back and glances back up at him

“Caleb - well. Do you want me to call you Bren, or stick with Caleb?”

He -

He is not Bren now, and hasn’t been since Bren’s soul was torn from his body.

“Just - Caleb,” he whispers, and Beauregard nods.

“That goes for you too, Nott - or Veth?”

His goblin - no.

His friend shakes her head. “Just - I’m not. I’m not Veth, right now. Just - stick with Nott.”

“Alright. And, Nott - what Luc said, about the lady with the pointy ears, and the swan. That’s - one of the elves we saw walking towards the house earlier, right? Caleb?”

She swings her eyes over to him, and he nods again.

“Yes that is - she must have been the one assigned to watching over Yeza.”

Cobal asks, voice almost a croak, “Is she a chemist, then, or -”

“No, she was - the Archmage of Antiquities, a historian. Though - with the beacon, and especially the alethiometer, that makes sense. That is most definitely history.”

He stops, considering. “And the other - that was Archmage De’leth. He’s in charge of domestic protection, the head of the military. He is probably here overseeing the Righteous Brand soldiers, and she was here trying to figure out that beacon.”

Nott narrows her eyes. “So did - the cricks, did they attack because they sensed that the beacon was here? It’s a piece of, of their astrology magic mumbo jumbo shit?”

Jester taps the letter. “The wording in this, it implies that there is more than one. And the one that we have - ours is from the attack on the tower in Zadash, and the Krynn were trying to steal it then. So I guess, the assembly had another one, and the Krynn attacked to try and get it back?”

Sprinkle bobs up and down, and Jester strokes a finger down her daemon’s back.

“So - if the Krynn attacked here, to try and get the beacon - does the assembly have your husband, Nott, or does the Krynn?”

Neither option is good.

Neither option is reassuring, neither option gives them any chance in hell at getting him back. But he is selfish, and he knows just how difficult trying to tear a pawn away from the chess game that the assembly orchestrates would be.

For all of their sakes, he hopes that the Krynn have Yeza.

Taking on an invasion force, involving themselves in this war - all that would be easier than trying to face the entire might of the Cerberus Assembly.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Daemons introduced in chapter two:
> 
> Edith - Unnamed daemon (Treeoth, a black lab)
> 
> Luc - Korvit (unsettled)
> 
> Yeza - Iridi (golden hamster)
> 
> Archmage Martinet De'leth - unnamed daemon (snowy owl)
> 
> Archmage Vess Derogna - unnamed daemon (mute swan)
> 
> Next chapter probably up on Thursday or Friday! Like I said, if you have any questions, I'll answer them in the comments. 
> 
> (and hey, thanks for reading! If you want to scream at me about this fic, any other fics, or the new His Dark Materials show thats coming out (AAAAAAAA), im on tumblr @contre-qui-rose for fic and @moonbyrd for anything else)


	3. Truth Seeker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Truth, Conversations, and a Tunnel to Traverse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tiny bit shorter than usual, apologies for that!

The inn that they end up in - the Goldfield Tavern and Lodge, if the sign swinging in the breeze outside is to be believed - is ramshackle but still relatively nice, and near empty. It’s understandable, he thinks, given the conflict that’s recently conspired under the city. Jester gets three rooms for the lot of them- he doesn’t know what the sleeping arrangements are, not yet, and he’s not sure if they can even be called arrangements.

He doesn’t - he wouldn’t want to sleep in a room with him if he was in Nott’s position. He wouldn’t blame her for wanting to separate herself and her daemon from his own mire of shit.

Beauregard leaves with the others while he stays in one of the rooms, spellbook, papers, and inks set out in front of him while he tries frantically to focus and keep his brain from straying to bad memories.

Despite his best efforts - his hands reach up, again and again, to scratch at the phantom feelings of crystals that he knows were there, are there, will be there again if he finds him, takes him and breaks him and uses him again, takes his daemon away, severed and empty and gone and wrong and broken, again -

His hand trembles and he glances down to watch a blot of ink about to smear over the entire page before Frumpkin sticks his paw and catches it as it falls, golden fur staining black.

His daemon slow blinks up at him and starts to carefully wash the ink off with a scraping tongue.

He needs to focus. He can’t afford to make mistakes, not with Ikithon and the assembly knocking at his door and at the doors of his friends.

So, he writes.

(He finds a dick, inked carefully on the edge of one of the pages he’s already completed, after the second hour, and has to spend a second just pulling his hair and trying not to cry. He’s not upset. It’s funny, almost, but right now it’s just too much.)

—

The others pour into the room a few hours later, after the sun’s started to sink below the fields in the distance.

Beauregard and Joeria collapse onto the floor, legs splayed out in front of them.

“So,” she starts, fingers rapping against her knee, “I think he was taken by cricks. This guy I talked to, at the local doctor’s place - she was cool, by the way, fucking massive dog daemon - he said that - and his name was Jeff, isn’t that a stupid name? I didn’t catch his daemon’s name, but it was probably like, Karen or something - but yeah, he said that he saw Yeza get scooped up by four Krynn that ran off.”

They all stare at her, and Nott’s brow furrows. “Wait, he saw it - he saw it happen?”

Beauregard nods. “He was there, he ran in and saved Luc.”

“Shit,” Nott whispers, and Cobal shifts nervously from his perch on her shoulder.

Jester shakes her head wildly, and stares at all of them, nervousness evident in her eyes. “Wait, what if - Caleb, what’s the possibility that your mean people can change memories?”

It takes a concerted effort to keep his face blank and Beauregard and Nott both half-wince and turn towards him.

A hundred percent, he thinks hysterically.

He keeps his voice level as he answers, or at least tries to, but it still shakes.

“Pretty good.”

Caduceus shifts, behind Nott, and Clohria taps her claws against his forehead. “We can - we’ll get a little tired, but in the morning, we can ask for some guidance, check it out?”

Nott’s mouth twists, and Jester jumps in, “I could send him a message? To see where he is?”

Fjord nods, and Tirley scents the air with her tongue. “Couldn’t hurt.”

Caleb’s shaking his head even as Nott and Caduceus echo, “It could hurt.”

Nott continues, “If he’s with the Rexxentrum people, they might - they could sense that, and then what the fuck would happen to us -”

That’s -

“Are you talking about what you do, Jester, not what Nott and I can do?”

She nods.

“That’s divine magic, then. I don’t - that would be harder to detect, but still probably not a good idea.”

“I could just - I could be like, hey, don’t respond to this if anyone is spying on you, or something.”

Tirley rasps, “If you’re alive, just say ow.”

Sprinkle shivers, on Jester’s back, and the teifling nods at Fjord. “That’s a good one, I can do that.”

 

“Why don’t we - let Mr. Clay figure out if he’s alive first, and then try that.”

Beauregard jerks up from the floor and points at the window, and the at the wall, and then at the door, and then at the window again, rethinking.

“The - the Jeff guy, he said that the tunnels that the Krynn came through, they’re on the edge of town. We could go look into those, maybe, see if they aren’t all the way collapsed? If the Krynn have him, that could be an easy way of tracking where they’re taking him, if they are using travel by tunnel.”

Clohria lets out a small squeaking noise, her arms patting at Caduceus’s hair in agreement.

“I think that sounds like a good idea. But it’s almost dusk - we should eat first, yeah? Get some food.”

They do so. He doesn’t eat much, in all honesty, his stomach churning beneath his coat and anxiety still burning in the back of his mind.

What little he does eat tastes fresh.

They walk the way out of the village towards the edge of the fields, where a group of crownsguard cluster around a deep hole leading underground.

Fjord, immediately, takes charge, Tirley slinking down his arm to settle in thick coils around his wrist. “Excuse me,” he calls out, and then carries out a conversation with the crownsguard while the rest of them hang back, daemons at their sides.

He only catches snippets of the conversation. Something about a worm, digging these tunnels, a mouth with endless rows of teeth. Another mention of the attack in Zadash.

Fjord turns to the rest of them and gestures, and they follow him down the slope into the tunnel, the crownsguard watching them carefully as they sweep past him.

It’s steep, the descent, and they all climb down the rope laid into the side of it, the only light now coming from the glowing amethyst atop Caduceus’s staff. It’s musty, this far down in the earth, dank and damp scents mixing with rotting plant matter and soil.

The bottom of it, where the slope edges out to flat ground once again, continues for a few hundred feet before stopping abruptly, shovels and pickaxes left abandoned in the stone and soil of the walls.

For a moment, the firbolg’s eyes light up along with his staff, a dim pink glow. He blinks, and it’s gone, only to be replaced by a brighter glow that darkens once more.

“Nothing magical, beyond us, down here. Nothing undead, either,” he says, his eyes crinkling at Caleb as he says the last part.

He looks towards the ground, away from the other man’s face.

He and Caduceus had had a talk, on the boat, months ago at this point, about why he registers as not-alive but not-undead on Caduceus’s otherworldly senses.

He -

He _is_ alive. It’s just. With what his connection to Frumpkin is, at this point, looped not through the material plane as normal but through the Feywild instead, he isn’t the same kind of alive that his friends are, with their material daemon connections. Nott registers more alive than he does, and she’s died before.

It’s all very theoretical, what he’d been forced to do to patch his soul back together.

Theoretical and hard to explain to a firbolg that had only recently left the parcel of land he’d lived his entire life on.

If Caduceus had been listening while he was driving the cart, he probably had an inkling as to the truth of what is happening between his daemon and his soul, at the moment.

He may not have been listening. He’s not very thrilled about the possibility of having to repeat that story, even if it is sharing with a friend who deserves to know what kind of person he’s tied his allegiances to.

When he tears himself out of his thoughts and focuses once again on the earth in front of him, Jester’s pressing her ears up to the edge of the far wall, Caduceus doing the same on the other side. He can just faintly hear the low humming that the other man is making, the noise resonating through the floor of the tunnel and up through his aching bones.

Caduceus steps back from the wall and shrugs, and the two clerics walk back towards the group.

“We can either - attempt to dig out this tunnel and follow it the hundreds of miles it would take to get to Xhorhas. Or, we take my son to Alfield, or we track down Caleb’s old teachers in Rexxentrum, or we head back to Nicodranas, get help from what’s-his-face -” Nott rambles, claws twitching as she runs them through Cobal’s feathers.

“It would take weeks to get to Nicodranas, and I don’t - attacking, trying to assassinate the head of the Cerberus Assembly by ourselves? Probably not the greatest option,” Joeria states, and as they ascend the rope one by one to exit the tunnel, she, Vrokin, and Cobal carry the smaller and flightless daemons in their teeth to help everyone get off the rope.

They head back towards the inn, walking carefully through the dark streets of the village, Caduceus’s staff still emitting torchlight. “In the morning,” he rumbles, quietly but still deep, “I can figure out some things. If he’s alive, whether he’s above ground or below ground. Hopefully.”

Cautiously, Nott slips a hand into Caduceus’s and squeezes, once, before letting ago and slowing to walk at the back of the group.

He wants -

It doesn’t matter what he wants. She’s avoiding him, he thinks, and he’s going to let her.

Beauregard walks quickly at her usual pace, but right now she’s purposefully slowed down to match the slower walking speeds of the group.

“Guys,” she starts, eyebrows starting to creep up, “what if - and this is a stretch, maybe, but what if the Krynn aren’t the bad guys? Mind-altering magic aside, most of us can disguise ourselves, and we’re just basic adventurers. What if the Rexxentrum people have Yeza, but they disguised themselves as Krynn to take them, while taking advantage of the war to mask their efforts?”

“If they were just going for Yeza, why - this is an important town in a war, for food. Attacking here, attacking their own people, razing these fields and homes means risking famine. They wouldn’t do that.” He knows that, at least. Felderwin supplies most of the food for large swathes of the empire with harsher growing conditions. Risking that would be ludicrous for the Assembly, but completely strategic and within reason for the Krynn.

They stop talking, for a moment, as they approach the inn and head upstairs, packing into the middle of the three rooms that they had purchased earlier.

With a sigh, Caduceus sits down on the edge of the bed, Clohria hopping off his head and soaring down to settle in his lap. The lot of them settle in around the room, and he sits with his knees up against his chest against the door, Frumpkin half curled in the gap between his raised legs and the ground.

Caduceus nods at Jester, and mimes something incomprehensible. “Are we going to - poke that thing, tonight?”

“The - we already left the tunnels, Caduceus. I thought we were waiting for tomorrow, after you figure out if Nott’s husband is alive or not.” Jester rubs a hand against her collarbone and brings Sprinkle down from her neck to the floor, where the daemon runs a few feet to curl up against where Joeria and Vrokin had sat near each other.

“No, not the tunnels - we have some objects, in our possession now. Maybe we want to just - take a look at those.”

Caduceus sounds - off, almost. When he glances over, the firbolg’s hands are clasped and still in his lap, Clohria’s head resting on top, but looking closer his hands are clasped together just a shade too tightly, his ears tilted downward and back.

“Mr. Clay, are you talking about - fiddling with the dodecahedron, with the tripod, the gold thingy?” Nott’s voice is verging on incredulous, and Cobal’s beak opens and shuts a few times with a clack.

“I know - right now, we need to find your husband, Nott. But these objects - I was out of options. I’m here, because where I was, I was out of options, and the Wildmother brought me to you. We’ve found something. I don’t know what they mean yet, but I went looking for them, and here we are.”

Beauregard gives Caduceus a considering look. “You said - before. That the life force, your home - it was getting corrupted, right? Getting sucked away.”

He nods. “Has been for a while. The forest around it, somethings wrong, there. It's overtaking the graces, supplanting the Wildmother’s protection. It shouldn’t be happening. We were supposed to protect that place, and we were failing, and I was failing. There are others - I don’t know if it’s happening there. We don’t communicate much. But I - I worry. And if these objects have a chance, a chance at reversing that corruption? I think that the Wildmother has led me here with you all, and that this may be part of what I’m looking for.”

Nott glances up, fists still tight, but loosening. “You said - we, Mr. Clay? Your family?”

He nods, and Nott softens, her eyes glancing back down and then darting across the room towards Caleb and Frumpkin.

“Yeah there was - a lot of us. We’ve been protecting that temple since its existence. We built it. We founded it. And then one by one, they all left, until it was just me. And I couldn’t - I couldn’t fix it. I was out of options.”

Caduceus sounds almost angry, in this moment, frustrated at something, at himself.

“Have you - you can speak with the Wildmother. Have you checked in with her, figured out where they are? After they all left?” Beauregard leans against the thick wood of the walls.

“I think,” Caduceus half-whispers, voice catching somewhere on its way out of his throat, “that she would let me know if I needed to know. That’s not an answer I really - it’s not an answer I’m looking for right now.”

Beauregard's face twists, and she nods.

“Best to have faith and have hope and not second guess how she’s decided to move forward. Corrin and Cleo talked about trying to find some of the other temples, but I don’t know. No one - no one’s come back. When you all came, I figured out that this was where I was meant to be, not just twiddling my thumbs in that graveyard. I need to save my home. But this - this is where I’m meant to be.”

He clears his throat. “Sorry, this isn’t - this isn’t about me. But I think, fiddling with this stuff, with the gold thing, that could help us.”

Nott stares at him, and deadpans, “Can we go to sleep now so you can figure out if my husband is alive or not?”

Cobal lets out a crow from his perch on her shoulder, and Caduceus’s shoulders lower, a small smile coming to his face.

“Yeah, let’s - let’s sleep. That’s important.”

They separate into the usual arrangements, with Yasha, Jester and Beau disappearing into one room with their daemons practically piled on top of each other, Fjord and Caduceus moving to the next room, and leaving him and Nott in this room. Nott, after the hell that was today, falls asleep almost instantly, curled in a ball around Cobal at the end of the bed without a word to him otherwise.

He is not so lucky.

Forty-three minutes of trying, desperately, to calm his brain down later, he’s strapping his book harness back on, straightening his bandages, and toeing his boots back on as he descends the stairs to the main room of the inn, shutting the door as quietly as he can behind him.

It’s near dark, downstairs, except for a faint dim light from the corner and the torch above the bar, where a bar hand is half dozing at the counter.

The light in the corner, on the other hand, hosts the large shape of Caduceus, a teacup clasped in his hands, staff emitting a faint light from under the table.

With a clumsy step, he switches his destination from the empty booth in the corner to Caduceus’s table. The firbolg looks up at him as he nears, and gives him a soft smile, taking another sip from his teacup.

“Mr. Caleb,” he nods, and then tilts his head towards the pouch at his side.

“Would you like some tea?”

He shakes his head, and Caduceus shrugs.

He traces a finger around the rim of the teacup, and then grins at him, edging on sad. “I thought I had grabbed herbal tea, earlier today, but it was the normal kind, so I’m just too keyed up to sleep right now. This one though, it’s a nice lavender mint.”

Clohria looks him over from her usual position atop Caduceus’s shock on pink hair, and her whiskers twitch.

“Where’s Frumpkin?” She asks, head tilting.

With a start, he notices that his daemon hadn’t followed him down the stairs. He hadn’t - he hadn’t noticed -

He grabs the countertop with one hand, knuckles whitening, and drops his awareness of his own sense away in favor of grabbing for his daemon’s.

Dropping into Frumpkin, before Ikithon, had the curious sensation of the world doubled, of two things he was able to see and comprehend and know at the same time. If he had focused, back then, Frumpkin could sit in his lap and read one book while he read another, and he could go into four eye and read both at the same time, splitting his attention.

Now, though, dropping into his daemon is like missing a step on the way down the stairs, jarring and almost violent as his own sense drop away and his cat’s replace them.

Frumpkin is still upstairs, wrapped in the blankets, claws sinking in and out of his paws as he purrs to nothing in the bed.

He does that when he’s sad. Especially when he’s alone.

With a snap of his fingers, he drops out of his daemon’s senses and Frumpkin pops to the Feywild. With another snap, he’s out, and settled back in his lap.

Moving Frumpkin to the Feywild, even just for a second, sends an echo of remembered pain through his body that he knows he’s imagining.

The pain he feels from the strain on his daemon bond is constant and steady and throbbing in the back of his mind, unchanging despite the distance from his daemon. But he knows that it’s supposed to hurt, to be painful, to rip and tear when his daemon is on another plane.

He looks up, and Clohria’s glided down to the table. Frumpkin pushes his way out of his lap and touches noses with the large squirrel, and the two of them curl into each other on top of the table.

“I -”, he gets out, and then stops.

Swallows bile that he feels like never fully disappears.

“Did you hear what - what I talked about, in the cart?”

Caduceus’s ears twitch.

“Most of it, yes. Enough that you don’t need to tell me anymore.”

He sags in his chair. It shouldn’t be a relief, not having to talk about it.

Or maybe it should be. It is.

“I assume - what we talked about on the boat. That’s because of what that man did to you?”

He nods, voiceless.

Caduceus’s eyes turn dark, and he glances over to where Clohria and Frumpkin have settled against each other.

“He, um.” He blinks away a stray tear - something in his eye.

“He broke our bond. I was - soulless, I guess, for lack of a better word, until someone - they had been at the facility I was being kept in. Another patient, maybe -” he lies, because he knows who patched him together, but the truth is more like a lie than this lie, “- they set up a ritual. Find - Find Familiar, actually. It got us close enough to function, to be functional. Normal daemon bonds, they get rooted through the astrological particles on this plane. Daemons are born on this plane, they live with their people on this place, they die on this plane and then their dust goes back into the Astral plane. People who are separated, the normal way, their daemon bonds go through the Astral plane, so then their daemon’s can go anywhere, because the Astral plane is just to the side of this plane, and obviously has more astrological particles, so they aren’t restricted to the radius around their person. It’s the same thing in theory, for me, but through the feywild instead. It’s not -” and he laughs, bitter and deep in his throat, “- it’s not a good solution. But it’s manageable.”

He didn’t tell this part to Beau or Nott. Little bits about - about how his connection to Frumpkin is different, because that’s easily apparent just being around him for more than a few days.

Not the majority that he shares with Caduceus.

Because - there are things, now, that they know about each other. Not the touchstones that he shares with Nott (shared, maybe. He needs to - he needs to figure that out, maybe maybe maybe), not the bond he’s built with Beauregard, not the friendship and trust he’s ever so slowly eked out with the rest of the group.

Caduceus understands pain in a way that the others do not.

Because, on that ship -

_He is on the edge of the deck, leaning against the railing, and staring at the stars. There are thousands. More than that, even, this far out into the darkness of the ocean, on a night this clear. More stars than he was able to see in Rexxentrum, or even Blumenthal. More stars by far than the faint ones he could spot from below the trees that obscured Ikithon_ _’s cottage._

_This far out, he can even see the dust clouds painting the sky in drapes of purples and blues against the black._

_There_ _’s movement behind him, but he doesn’t turn around. He knows who it is, already, who’s feet tread out that careful and uneven path._

_Caduceus settles in next to him against the railing._

_“Hello, Mr. Caleb.”_

_He stares out into the ocean, and watches his gull-shaped daemon fly, back-lit by thousands of pinpricks of light, hundreds of feet away from him._

_“Hallo, Mr. Clay.”_

_Clohria isn_ _’t with him. He glances up, and above them - far above them, past the ropes that support the sails, he can just barely make out the white-furred form of the other man’s daemon making her way to the crow’s nest._

_“Are you - aware, Mr. Caleb, that you aren’t - you aren’t undead. But you’re not alive, either, are you?”_

_It_ _’s a little harsh. It’s the truth._

_“I am, Mr. Clay.”_

_For a long minute, they lean against each other in silence._

_“Does it hurt?” His low voice is barely more than a whisper, just a rumble in his chest._

_He laughs, tiny and broken and pained._

_“Does yours?”_

_“No.”_

_He looks over, but Caduceus is just staring out into the dark waters._

_“Not that. Never that. My knee, usually, but not that.”_

_Caduceus sighs._

_He stretches an arm out, and the shape moving above them jumps and then glides down is careful circles to land on his arm. Clohria brushes a clawed paw over her whiskers and smiles at him._

_With a snap, he brings Frumpkin back to curl around his neck, cat-shaped once more._

_He doesn_ _’t meet Caduceus’s eyes._

_“It does, ja. Nothing I can do about it.”_

_Caduceus nods, slowly, and together they stay and watch the sun rise over the waves._

He trusts Caduceus as much as he trusts the rest of the Mighty Nein.

But in this, just maybe, he trusts him a little bit more. Because - Caduceus already has stepped his way in and out of death, lived with pain, watched people living with pain and grief his entire life.

He’s a good friend. And he trusts him with this.

With a gentle hand, Caduceus reaches out and runs his hand along his, and then pulls away.

“You should try and get some sleep, Caleb.”

He nods, faintly, and watches as he carefully scoops up Clohria, avoiding Frumpkin entirely, and makes his way up the stairs.

He follows a minute later, and manages to lose himself to sleep, the quiet purring of his daemon, Nott’s measured breaths, and Caduceus’s snoring next door sending him off.

He does not dream.

—

 

He wakes up just as the sun is starting to peek over the land outside and shine through the windows directly into his eyes. He can feel, without thinking too hard about the time - (It’s six forty-three, he thinks, and then sighs inwardly) that he’s just barely had enough sleep to regain his energy, but barely enough sleep is still enough, and he forces his eyes open.

Nott and Cobal are no longer on the edge of the bed, or even in the room, and he rubs at his eyes as Frumpkin hops off the bed and listens for a moment, cocking his head.

“I think - in Jester and Beau’s room? Jester’s excited, about something. She’s doing the trilling thing.” He listens as well, and sure enough, he can just barely hear Jester’s voice rising in volume on the other side of the wall.

He can still hear Caduceus snoring on the opposite side, so their entire party doesn’t seem to be awake without them.

When he pushes open the door to their room, Jester is sitting on the bed, leaned against Beauregard, Yasha sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of them, staring at Nott. Their daemons, excluding Cobal, are piled up at the end of the bed. Nugget is sleeping in one of the corners of the room, legs twitching idly as he dreams.

Nott, on the other hand, is leaning against the wall, facing the rest of the women, and Cobal is perched on her shoulder, both of them staring down at a golden disk in her hands.

The Alethiometer, he realizes.

Beauregard notices him enter, and as he shuts the door behind him, she waves him over. “Dude, this is - just watch.”

He walks over, letting Frumpkin down to curl up with the other daemons, and sits down against the bed next to Yasha, pressing his back into Jester’s legs.

Nott glances at him, and then smiles with far too many teeth, something like hope in her golden eyes.

“Nott - How old was I when my daemon settled?” Beauregard asks, and he twists around to look at her face, confused. She just flaps a hand at him, and he turns back towards Nott -

Nott, who’s twisting the dials of the alethiometer with steady quick movements, and then spends a moment studying whatever result the hands are giving her, face gently illuminated by the golden concentration of dust within the device.

“Seventeen,” Nott answers, not even a minute later, and Beauregard lets out a low whoop and leans down to punch him - gently, at least - in the shoulder.

“Ask a question, Caleb. Something that no one here knows,” Jester whispers down into his ear, and when he looks back at Nott, her ears are twitching happily.

“ _Was_ \- what was my favorite book, as a child?”

Nott’s hands go to work, twisting dials with deft certainty, and Jester’s feet press into his shoulder blades. “Oh, Caleb, I bet it was like - a Caleb Cleveland and Angus story? I loved those as a kid!”

He smiles, slightly, and leans harder into her legs. “Those started coming out when I was ten. I did read the first few, though.”

Nott looks back up at him, face illuminated by gold, and grins. “It was a book of fairy tales, about the Feywild. And I think about that one god, the one that’s banned here, that you found a symbol of at the safe house?”

Beauregard laughs, above him. “You had - you had an illegal fairy tales’ book? Was it _Corellon_ _’s Fables?_ Somebody in Kamordah tried to purchase that in the night-market there and got nearly chased out of town.”

He nods, and Beauregard laughs again. “Gods, that’s - so unsurprising.”

But fairy tales aside -

“Nott.” She looks up, and meets his eyes, while he tries to maintain the contact. “You can - you can read the alethiometer?” He asks, with something akin to wonder in his voice.

His friend nods, eyes wide, and then she closes them and her face scrunches up. After a long moment, her eyes open again, and she twists the dials of the alethiometer quickly, staring at whatever results she reads from it.

Her ear’s twitch downward, once, and then come to rest pressed back against her skull.

“He’s in Xhorhas.”

The relative cheer of the room darkens in an instant as they are all reminded of why they even have the device in the first place.

Nott sighs. “That’s - maybe better? Maybe worse? I don’t know.”

“At least - at least we know, now? And Cad doesn’t have to do his trance thing.”

Just as Beauregard says that, the door opens again, and Caduceus comes through, bending his torso so as not to have Clohria hit the door frame. He smiles at the group, and then directs his look toward Nott. “He’s alive, Nott. On the way to Ghor Dranas, but I don’t know where that is… exactly… are we having a meeting?”

Nott holds the alethiometer in her clawed hands, and then drops it and points at Yasha. “That’s in - in Xhorhas, right?”

Yasha nods. “It is. It’s - I’ve never been there. But it’s the capital of the dynasty, in the north part.

He’s read some, about that city. “I have - at the Cobalt libraries in Zadash, there was a book about Xhorhas. Ghor Dranas is, it’s the sight of the final battles of the Calamity. Where the betrayer gods made their final stands. It’s - the book talked about how the whole area is under the influence of something called the Luxon, something affecting the people of that city. It’s blanketed in perpetual night.”

Nott’s nose wrinkles as Yasha adds, “It is always nighttime, around there. We - my tribe always avoided it because more beast folk lived up there, working with the drow.”

“Beast folk?” Fjord’s voice cuts through the beginning of Nott’s muttering, and he glances around the room, rubbing at his chin. “Like - bugbears, hobgoblins, orcs, that kind of beast folk?”

She nods. “I do not - they are not beasts, they have daemons. That’s just what they’re called? I think? But also many real beasts. Dangerous ones.”

“If we head through the tunnels, we may get lucky and reach them before they get there. They aren’t there yet.” Clohria’s small form jumps off Caduceus’s head and glides to the pile of daemons on the bed, Tirley slipping off Fjord’s wrist and settling there at well. Cobal, after pressing his beak to Nott’s cheek, flies over as well.

“Can we even go fast enough to catch them though? They have those worm things; they’re probably traveling pretty fast.”

Jester hums. “I can send him a message? Be like, hey, Yeza, we are coming for you, but do you think you can escape, also your wife is alive, isn’t that great?”

Nott shakes her head no, and scowls. “Maybe - not like that. Be hopeful? Stay alive, we’re coming to get you, okay?”

“Okay that’s probably better. What does - what does he look like?”

Nott cocks her head, and then with a ripple her green skin morphs away into a halfling, curly brown hair with long sideburns, pointed ears that are unusual for a halfling but not unheard of, a larger nose, narrow shoulders, shorter than the average halfling.

“Not much of a looker,” Nott whispers, and then with a flash she’s back in her own form. “But he was wonderful.”

“Is-” “Still is-” “He’s not dead, Nott -”

They stop, and Nott smiles, small and probably fake.

“How long were you married, Nott?” Jester’s tail swishes against the rough sheets of the bed.

“Are we - counting since I’ve been a goblin? About five years. Married, uh, married young.”

She twists one of her rings around on her fingers, and the smile disappears in favor of a look that’s fond and terrified and exhausted, all at once. “Lost my ring, though. When I drowned.”

For a long moment, the room is silent.

He slowly - cautiously, telegraphing his movements - slides across the wood of the floors to sit next to Nott, and she leans her head against his shoulder.

“We need to make a plan, for what we’re doing,” he whispers into the room, and the rest of his friends nod.

“Your husband is heading towards Xhorhas. I am not feeling very optimistic, I think, about those tunnels, but I have been wrong before and I will be wrong again. So, let’s - check those out. Do something positive.”

Fjord crosses his arms, and leans against the wall. “Before that, though - we should get Luc out of here.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah - hm,” Jester hums, and then her hands twist around her holy symbol and her eyes light up, just faintly.

Under her breath, she whispers, “I’m a friend of Veth. We know you’ve been taken, but stay hopeful! We’re looking for you. If you can, tell us where you are currently?”

After a long moment’s pause, the light in her eyes fizzles out and her eyes dart towards Nott, brightening. “He’s alive! He said it’s dark and he has to be quiet, but he said thank you!”

Nott sighs, fingers tightening around the alethiometer again.

“Alright. I - alright. Let’s get my son out of here.”

Eventually, they decide on sending Luc and Edith with some of the soldier’s Beauregard had met yesterday to escort them to Alfield. Bryce will welcome them, he knows they will, and with that settled they take their things from the inn and head to the tunnels, once again. Beauregard buys some pouches, first, for reasons unknowable to him and everyone else.

They make it past the guards surrounding the cave by claiming to be geologists, Beauregard claiming them in the name of the Cobalt Soul.

Maybe that will come to haunt them, later, but hopefully not?

Probably. They seem to have rather bad luck.

The tunnel is the same as it was yesterday. Still dark, with the only light coming from Caduceus’s staff and his own concentrated dancing lights, the walls are formed out of the same dark stone and soil that leads up the slope to the barely visible sunlight outside.

Jester cracks her knuckles, and then with a shudder she transforms, Sprinkle’s form morphing into her polymorph as the two turn into an enormous badger, with large arcing claws and dark spines protruding out of her back. She grins, a mouth full of terrifying teeth, and then with a snort starts to burrow her way into the rock and stone, claws carving out a path that extends for a hundred feet, and then two hundred feet, as they follow slowly behind her - and then with a crash, her paws carve through to empty air and the rest of the wall finds away, and they are left staring into a larger cavern, the faintest sound of running water echoing in the darkness. Nugget blinks ahead, momentarily, before popping back and panting happily, having found nothing.

With a pop, Jester morphs out of her badger form, Sprinkle once again resting along her neck, and she gestures the rest of them into the cavern.

As his lights start to illuminate it, he stares, noticing how the tunnel curves up ahead, seemingly to avoid the eroded path of the underground river a few hundred feet in front of them.

Quartz crystals flash as he moves his lights around, and the cavern itself seems empty and abandoned.

“Guys, there’s no one else I would rather rescue my husband with,” Nott whispers in the darkness, and Fjord chuckles nervously, hands clenching.

“Guess we’re going, huh.” Caduceus taps his staff, and his light goes out, leaving only the dim light from his cantrip.

Together, they start to walk.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No plot relevant daemons introduced in this chapter
> 
> I think this should be like, semi-clear at this point, but dunamis in this verse is replaced with the magic im building within the context of astrological particles and dust. As usual, if you've got any questions, I'll answer them! Next chapter should be up Monday night, and chapter five will be up on tuesday, because chapter four is a non-typical chapter that i had a lot of fun with but isn't a full chapter. 
> 
> thanks for reading!


	4. Interlude I: Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic is structured in chapter arcs with shorter interludes in between these arcs; these interludes are used for alternate points of view, story beats outside of the main plotline, and in-universe books, maps, images, and other fun things. hopefully fun, at least! I have fun making them, and I'm hoping that you have fun reading/seeing them!
> 
> image description in end notes

 

_“Despite past findings that dust, as the previous philosophers deemed it, was only involved in the relationship between daemons and people, this is not the case. Current studies prove that dust, astrological particles, are part of every single thing in this world. Nothing can survive without astrological influence, even non-sentient creatures, plants, and sentient beings that lack daemons. While this theory had initially been tested through the use of now-illegal astrological deprivation chambers, a technology developed for torture by the exiled and disgraced arcanist Anna Ripley within the Cerberus Assembly, the fact that everything interacts with the astral plane, is linked by the astral plane, and is associated with astrological particles as shown by the Gruude photogram emulsion means that everything in turn depends upon its association with the astral plane to exist…” - Astral Particles, Chapter II of Astrological Arcanum, Edition XII, Vol I_

_He knows that this is a dream._

_It_ _’s - a familiar dream, one that he’s been having for years, ever since he was severed._

_It_ _’s a nice dream. Nicer than any other he had while severed - well, while - (empty, gone, broken, soulless) severed he didn’t really dream except for these ones, or maybe everything was a dream._

_Being severed was akin to just - being locked away in his mind. He was still awake, just drifting. Nothing mattered. No thoughts, no energy, no creativity. Just - void. He would wake up and he would sit, and he would sleep, and sometimes while sleeping came nothing, but sometimes while sleeping came these dreams._

_Sometimes he would be sitting in a tree in the woods around Blumenthal, safe and warm and cuddling with his daemon, high above the rushing water of a stream below him, the setting sun shining golden on his skin._

_Sometimes he was at the Academy - not Ikithon_ _’s cottage, not their rooms, not the basement, but the actual academy, those shining days of learning and lessons and teachers who were kind and cared about them, who taught him new cantrips and piano lessons and Celestial. In those dreams, he would sit and play piano for hours, or sit in a library and read celestial poetry, or be hanging out with Astrid and Eodwulf in the courtyard, minor illusions and dancing lights making a show against the far wall._

_Sometimes - sometimes the dreams are at Ikithon_ _’s cottage, but those are never bad. It’s always memories, of the days Ikithon left them to their own devices, when they would curl up in Eodwulf’s bed and pile all the blankets together and they were hurting and exhausted but they were together, and had jokes and stories and old Zemnian songs to sing under their breaths, warm and safe._

_The worst of them, though, even though it_ _’s still a good dream - is the one that he’s having right now._

_He_ _’s sitting cross-legged on a forest floor, tall dark trees rising above him, soft moss and leaves beneath his legs. The sun is caught just before setting, and the slanted rays of light warm his back and glimmer with dust motes as he stares into the forest._

_He doesn_ _’t turn around, but he already knows who is there._

_“Hallo, Eodwulf.”_

_Usually - usually daemons are present in dreams._

_For some reason, these ones never have Frumpkin_ _’s warm presence in them. It had made sense, when he was severed, when these dreams were his only respite, but now - now it just makes him sad._

_This dream usually makes him sad._

_The person behinds him steps forward, feet crunching in the leaves, and sits next to him._

_He looks older. He - he knows that it is just his brain theorizing about what he would look like now. He hasn_ _’t seen his friend in sixteen years. This is just - a projected memory, aged up to what he wants._

_He looks good, though. Not as worn out as the last dream he had like this, whatever that says about his psyche._

_“Hallo, Bren.”_

_He flinches, almost, at the name, but Eodwulf isn_ _’t looking at him._

_“Sorry that it’s been awhile. Things have been - busy.”_

_He glances over, and Eodwulf keeps staring forward, eyes locked on something in the distance. His ears twitch closer to his neck, and he drags a hand over the bottom half of his face. Romaus isn_ _’t with him._

_There_ _’s a silver and blue emblem on crescent moons on Eodwulf’s cloak. His brain, again, projecting this image of what he thinks Eodwulf would look like older, well, free to worship who he chooses without fear of Ikithon or Empire._

_He doesn_ _’t - he never knows what to say in these dreams. He’s making them up, or at least his subconscious is, but he never knows how to respond._

_He hums, instead, and Eodwulf smiles._

_“We miss you. I think - soon, maybe. A few more months.”_

_He doesn_ _’t know what that means. A few months - he knows that as a group, there are a few months left until Jester’s Traveler meet up, a few months, maybe, to resolve Fjord’s patron issues, a few months until his past and patchwork soul catches up to him, and he joins Astrid and Eodwulf once again in the realm of the soulless._

_Hopefully not._

_A few months until he needs new socks, perhaps. That would be a welcome warning._

_The scene around them shifts, and he and Eodwulf are now sitting on a well-worn couch, threadbare and plush in equal measure. It_ _’s - it’s the common room couch from their dorm at the Academy. A warm light is being emitted from the lamp besides them, and Eodwulf reaches out and dims it._

_His eyes gleam in the half-light._

_“I promise, Bren. We promise. Soon.”_

_Promise what, brain, he asks himself - but he blinks, and Eodwulf is gone, and the dream dissolves to dust and strands of light._

Sometimes Astrid is there, in place of Wulf.

Neither dream is worse or better than the other.

But every time he wakes up, from a night of quiet imagined company with his friends who are suffering, soulless, maybe dead, now, somewhere on this plane - each time he wakes from this dream, he wakes with an added weight to the aching soul bond in his chest.

 

_He knows that this is a dream._

_Because it is. Because he_ _’s treading water, feet working to keep his head above water as eyes open all around him, his daemon’s weight around his neck terrifyingly gone._

_Tirley is never in these dreams._

_Never in his other ones, either, because these dreams are the only dreams he seems to have, nowadays._

_The eyes surround him, and blink in discordant harmony, a sea of golden orange glowing orbs, slatted and glaring at him from every angle._

_“W̷̺̘̫͉͇̤A͙̥̪͍͙͎͚T̞͍̰̕C͔͎͇͈̟̰̖H̴̝̦I̡̮̤͖̟͕̙̦N̴G̵̞͈͇͉.””_

_The water around him drains, suddenly, and he_ _’s left standing on a salt flat plain, a thin layer of water reflecting an endless void of stars above him._

_“W̷̺̘̫͉͇̤A͙̥̪͍͙͎͚T̞͍̰̕C͔͎͇͈̟̰̖H̴̝̦I̡̮̤͖̟͕̙̦N̴G̵̞͈͇͉.” his patron’s voice repeats, and he watches as one by one the reflections of the stars in the water disappear._

_Eyes take their place. Millions of them, now, and then they morph into each other, large now, hundreds, and then larger still, and then massive in front of him as dark coils entrap his body and take him back down beneath the water._

_It_ _’s dark. The eyes are closed, now, and he’s caught in rough scales and coils, skin rasping against the edges of them, air leaking from his lungs with every bubble that leaves his nose._

_It_ _’s futile to struggle. He knows that by know, but that doesn’t stop him from jerking anyways, air streaming past his lips as he screams, soundless, feet and arms straining at the coils of his patron’s body._

_“W͔AR͔͖͞ͅN̫͕͟I̬͔̱͓̞̥̣Ṇ̰̩͉̙̖͠G̮̣͓̻̕”_

_The coils tighten._

_“P̷̧̯̿Ụ̴̒Ñ̵̤̠͂Ï̶̼̄S̸̺̈̾H̷̥̓.”_

_The air leaves his lungs, and his vision darkens further -_

_And then, with a rush, he_ _’s above water again, gasping for air, standing once again in the thin layer of water._

_The stars slowly reappear in the sky above him, reflected endlessly against the water._

_“R̷̹̅E̷͉̚W̴̮̅A̶͙͋Ř̵͉D̶̙̈́”_

He wakes up with saltwater streaming past his lips, but with no blood this time.

It’s a reprieve, one that he isn’t sure he’s earned.

It’s welcome, anyways.

 

_“… and while daemon bonds remain a rather taboo topic of study due to the cultural differences within sentient daemon-capable races, recent forays into research in separation have uncovered the arcane background behind this practice. A normal daemon bond is one realized in the material plane. In the material plane, the kind of astrological particles that link a person to their daemon are not present in anything but in that bond. The farther a bond-partner moves away from the other, the more these particles spread out and stretch, creating pain and emotional distress for the moving parties. Separated daemons, in contrast, can move unlimited amounts of distance from their daemons. This is because their bonds are no longer realized on the material plane. Research has shown that instead, the process of separating - whether by death, or by crossing through a void-space - destroys a daemon bond’s realization within the material plane and re-establishes it in the astral plane, where the abundance of astrological particles means that the daemon bonds are no longer stretched by distance…” - Daemonology, Chapter IV of Astrological Arcanum, Edition XII, Vol I_

_This is a dream, and it is a familiar one._

_It_ _’s dark. It’s - it’s not always dark, not here, not these fields away from the drow, but right now it is dark, massive shadows painting everything she can see._

_She can feel her wings, outstretched, cold and shaking and bare, bones clattering in a horrifying cacophony that she can barely hear over the wind pushing her hair back._

_She doesn_ _’t know what happened._

_She -_

_Running, and fighting and sleeping and running again, over and over and over until she blinked, and she was here, bloody, kneeling at the stone feet of the Stormlord_ _’s altar, dread in her heart but she doesn’t remember why._

_Vrokin is next to her, draped across her knees, almost dead weight except for the fact that she_ _’s still breathing, fur stained black with ichor rather than her usual blinding white._

_She looks up, and the Stormlord_ _’s stone face stares, and stares, and thunder crashes around her, and she did something terrible._

_She goes to wipe the ichor away, and it remains._

_When this dream was not a dream, when it was memory-terror-hurting, she watched as over the months she spent wandering the wastes, terrible, alone, hurting, scared, daemon silent and black, her own hair fade from white to grey to black at the roots._

_Sometimes, she wakes up and she is alone, drenched in water, screaming at the sky because her people keep dying and she can_ _’t save them -_

This time, though, she wakes up warm and dry and still terrified with the knowledge that she doesn’t know what happened. (Chains around her mind. The touch of a red clawed hand under her chin. So much blood, seeped into her hair, her clothes, her hands stained red with it.)

But her friends are sleeping around her, Caduceus in the other bed snoring, the faint sounds of Caleb and Beau and Jester and Fjord and Nott audible, just barely, in the surrounding rooms.

It - helps.

She tells herself that they are alive.

It’s not enough, but it’s something.

She is so sick of losing people.

 

 

_“Beauregard.”_

_A swipe at her shoulder that she dodges, the motion blurring around the edges as the fist reels back to strike again._

_“Beauregard!”_

_A punch to her chin, now, that she takes and grins through, head reeling with shock and little pain._

_She ignores the voice and keeps fighting._

_“Listen to me-”_

_Jo yips, from the edge of the ring, and suddenly the lights dim and then go out, and she_ _’s on the floor staring up at an endless array of stars, dim and bright in equal measure._

_Roof tiles are cold beneath her back, and Jo_ _’s warm weight is pressed into her side._

_Jo is hawk shaped with red tail feathers and a vicious curve to her beak, and they both love it because if she closes her eyes hard enough and concentrates she can almost feel the wind buffing against her daemon_ _’s feathers as she circles ten feet above her head._

_“Please, Beauregard - Joeria!”_

_Her father is yelling._

_He_ _’s always yelling, always barking out orders at her, sit straight play nice don’t bite don’t scowl wear skirts what did you do to your hair your dress pay attention Beauregard don’t shift like that Joeria concentrate focus pay attention bed without dinner day without lunch no breakfast for little girls who don’t pay attention in lessons -_

_She places her hands over her ears and stares at the stars._

_It_ _’s weird, though, because all of the constellations look different, like three eyes opening in parallel -_

She wakes up to a half-muttered word from Jester’s side of the bed, “-don’t- chains” and rolls over, scrubbing at her eyes half-heartedly with one hand.

Jo nudges into her arm with a cold nose, and she pets her daemon lazily, already drifting back off.

Normal dream, that one.

She means - the eye thing was weird, but like.

Just the usual.

 

_“During the Age of Arcanum, the study of dust may have very well been eons ahead of our own minimal understandings. Much of the knowledge about astrological particles was lost when the libraries in Vasselheim burned during the Calamity. However, some surviving pre-Age of Arcanum theories surrounding dust still exist within the public consciousness, including the commonly held myths that daemons are evidence of sentience - disproved by the existence of sentient races with no daemons, i.e. Dragons, Aaracockra, and Kenku - and the also prevalent myth that daemons can survive after a person’s death and go on to possess other living daemons. That one, of course, is patently false. While ghosts exist, as shades of previously conscious thought bearing beings, daemons invariably dissolve once more unto the dust they once came from upon death…” - Historical Theories, Chapter V of Astrological Arcanum, Edition XII, Vol I._

_It is rare that he dreams. Well - he knows, logically, that he probably does dream, and just doesn_ _’t recall any of them._

_What_ _’s rare is that he dreams and remembers it upon waking._

_But this dream -_

_He_ _’s been having this dream for seasons upon seasons upon seasons, since the first winter after the last of his siblings had left the Grove._

_And in it -_

_He_ _’s younger, still unsettled, still bound by a limited distance to his daemon. Clohria, when he was this old, was usually mouse shaped or deer shaped or horse shaped, sometimes, when he wanted to go faster than his aching knee would let him._

_In this dream, he is alone._

_He shouldn_ _’t be. He knows, in the back of his mind, that his siblings and parents didn’t start leaving until after he was settled, until after he had gone through his ceremony. But in this dream -_

_He is alone, and he is kneeling at the roots of an oak tree, leafless boughs shifting and creaking in gale-force winds that press his clothes tight against his fur and force Clohria to shift into something clawed and small to resist the force._

_He presses his eyes closed and rests his forehead against the bark, and flinches with every sound that comes from around him._

_This isn_ _’t how it happened, because when he died for the first-second-third-fourth time he was surrounded by his family and their daemons and the Wildmother’s embrace, but in this dream he dies and wakes and dies and wakes and screams alone and shaking in the wind._

_Every time he blinks, the wind rips Clohria farther away, and the pain grows greater until it snaps and he_ _’s alone in his head, alone and lost and wrong, and it didn’t happen like this, it didn’t, why is this happening -_

_Every time he dreams this, the ending is the same._

_Clohria returns, squirrel shaped and ghost white and shivering, and the stars around him darken until he_ _’s kneeling in absolute darkness and still listening to the high-pitched shrieking of the wind._

He wakes up from this dream the same way he wakes up otherwise. He’s had this one in particular too many times to count, and it no longer unnerves him the way it used to.

Because it is, of course, just a dream.

It is.

 

 

_“Traveler, do you think -”_

_She stops painting the massive mural she_ _’s started on the side of the Dawnfather temple in Zadash and bites her lip._

_The spectral green cloak of her god, floating in the air next to her, wavers slightly._

_“Think what, Jester?”_

_She knows she_ _’s dreaming. She has these dreams a lot, recently, the one’s where she realizes she’s still asleep and can then do fun stuff, like fly around and play pranks she could never pull of in real life and pretend she’s back home with her Momma and all her friends instead of in the cart while it’s raining, or on the boat, or in the cell-cages-chains -_

_She cuts off that thought and leans back into empty hair, now hanging upside down from an invisible bar as she pokes more paint onto the stonework._

_“Do you think that one day, when we aren’t running and fighting and being weird anymore, we’ll stay friends? Or do you think they’ll leave?”_

_The Traveler hums behind her, and she beams as his transparent hand latches onto hers and paints along with her._

_“I don’t think they’ll leave, Jester. Who’d want to leave your shining personality?”_

_She pokes herself in the face with the paintbrush to make blush and furrows her brows in a mockery of a serious face._

_“I am preeeeety great,” she sing songs, and twists herself back upright again, floating down the thirty feet to the pavement._

_What she_ _’s painted here is beautiful, even if she doesn’t understand it, even if it looks kind of scary, almost._

_Pretty and scary._

_Because even though she had started out painting flowers, and then constellations, and then some cool rocks Caduceus had showed her last week, the largest thing in the painting is the thin golden chains that link and separate almost every aspect of the picture._

_“I don’t understand what the chains mean, but it looks super cool!”_

_But when she turns around, to waggle her eyebrows at the Traveler and suggest that they draw more dicks in it, he_ _’s gone, and then the rest of the world falls away and she’s falling in darkness that’s still full of chains -_

She wakes up with a gasp, still feeling like she’s falling.

Beau snores, loud and steady on the other side of the bed, and she calms down in increments, Sprinkle pressing into her chin and Nugget boofing quietly in his sleep from where he’s pressed up between her and Beau.

 

“One of the most intriguing theories surrounding astrological arcanum in recent times, as pioneered by Archmage Ikithon of the Cerberus Assembly, is that astrological particles are attracted, not only to daemon bonds, but to all forms of conscious thought and actions, as shown by his use of the Gruude emulsion on hand-crafted objects versus natural objects. Hand-crafted objects, when viewed in an astral photogram, show higher levels of dust concentrations than natural materials. Archmage Ikithon, in addition to that theory, has recently dedicated himself to studying the interactions of astrological particles, consciousness, and planer travel, something further explored in volume eight of this series, Planar Interactions.” - Current Theories, Chapter VII of Astrological Arcanum, Edition XII, Vol I.

 

_There_ _’s something wrong with the sky._

_She knows this, like how she knows that Yeza likes his tea with way too much honey and Caleb likes his tea over steeped and bitter because he has bad taste, like how she knows that Jester loves cinnamon and that Beauregard needs to talk to someone about her habit of hoarding food in her pockets._

_When she had been on the boat, with Caleb, and he had hoisted her on his shoulders and shown her brilliant things, there were other stars than these ones._

_She doesn_ _’t recognize these stars. Or - well, she does, but there are ones missing, absent from the sky on a cloudless and clear night._

_There_ _’s something wrong with the sky._

_No one else has noticed yet, but she_ _’s always looking up at people, looking up to snarl at monster’s faces and smile at her friends, and the stars have always been beautiful but now they are changing and she doesn’t know what that means._

_As she stares up, leaning from her position on the bottom of the cart that_ _’s journeying to nowhere on a road that never ends, she watches another star go out._

_The alethiometer is clutched in her hands, and she twists the knobs while still staring at the stars._

_The answer she gets is the opposite of reassuring._

_The voice that invades her mind a minute later is even less reassuring, even if it sounds nice, pleasant, like golden honey dissolved into black tea._

_“Veth. My little truth seeker. Do you understand?”_

_She doesn_ _’t._

_“Nott. Cobal. Truth seeker, way-finder, she who flies her own path -” the voice sings -_

She wakes up groggy and confused and unable to remember the fleeting edges of the dream that chases itself out of her mind the instant she wakes up.

Something about stargazing?

Just a dream.

She’s been forgetting a lot of her dreams lately.

 

_“Please turn to the proceeding volumes within this series for more information about Astrological Arcanum in a more detailed sense for arcane studying and learning. Any questions, requests for materials, or theoretical inquiries can be directed to Seanor Wiles, by the way of any local Arcana Pansophical office within the major cities on each continent.” - End Notes, Astrological Arcanum, Edition XII, Vol I._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IMAGE ID  
> {A book cover in dark leather with gold edging, entitled Astrological Arcanum, Edition XII, Vol I. Below the title is a decorative transmutation circle, also in gold. The middle of the image contains the title page, with a disclaimer that this book is merely an introduction to the subject. Below that disclaimer is a list of chapters - Introduction, Astrological Particles, Astrological Photograms, Daemonology, Planar Interaction, Historical Theories, and Current Theories. The bottom of the middle page and the back cover state that this book was written by Seanor Wiles and Windkeeper Yurek as part of the Arcana Pansophical, published in the year 835 P.D.}


	5. Brimstone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tunnels, tunnels, and more tunnels: a guide on how to not lose your mind in the tunnels.
> 
> (This guide is not liable for any loss of sanity not prevented by the guide)

The tunnels, of course, are dark.

While they branch into larger caverns from time to time, for the first few hours of walking, it’s just all of them stepping two by two through these ten feet tunnels, circular and carved out of stone by some creatures gnashing teeth.

Beauregard and Nott take up the front, Jester and Fjord side by side behind them, their daemons curled up on their person’s shoulders. He and Caduceus take up the middle, Frumpkin wrapped around his neck and Clohria precariously perched in the few feet between the tip of Caduceus’s head and the ceiling.

Yasha walks in the back, Vrokin on one side and Nugget on the other, and the make their way through the dark.

They’ve been walking for three hours, by his count, in mostly silence, only broken by his own faint humming and Caduceus’s off pitched whispered Sylvan singing alongside him, when Jester speaks up.

“So, guys, question? I’ve got the dodecahedron thingy, in my bag, that Yussah said we shouldn’t be taking out or bringing near anything or whatever, and now we’re taking it to, like, to the source?”

She doesn’t turn around to talk to them, but her voice in the small tunnel is easily audible.

“I think as long as we aren’t using it, and it’s in the other dimension, it’s probably fine?”

Fjord sounds cautious, but his reasoning is sound.

“I mean, yeah, until they capture me and flip my bag inside out.”

“For what it’s worth, Jessie, it’s a little late now to put it anywhere else.”

“I - yeah, that’s fair. But Beau, what if - what if this is a mistake? Like, we’re just playing into their hands, or something -”

Nott scoffs, from up ahead, and Cobal swivels around on her head, his claws tangling in the strands of her hair. “We spent three fucking months on the ocean, we’re fucking saving our husband!”

“I didn’t mean it like that, Nott -”

Jester doesn’t even finish before Nott’s shoulders drop and the tiny form of his friend sighs, curling in on herself a bit. “I - I know, Jester. I’m just - we need to find him. It’s too late to think about what-ifs, at this point.”

They walk more, and more, and more.

Five miles, ten, fifteen, feet plodding out and endless path amidst the stone and dark.

He’s lost track of the miles by the time Caduceus’s humming, next to him, cuts off.

“Mr. Caleb, what time is it?”

He knows, in the back of his head, exactly what time it is. It’s easy to keep track, even without the light.

After he sleeps down here, sunless, that might change, but for now at least he knows.

“Around sunset, Mr. Clay.”

Caduceus nods, and then raises his voice slightly so that it carries to the entire group. “Folks, we probably want to rest, now. Stop for the night.”

“I mean - if it’s only sunset, we should press on. A couple more hours, maybe?”

Nott’s suggestion is met with agreement from Jester and Fjord and shrugs from the rest, and thusly they press onward.

It’s another four hours later, maybe around eleven (It’s eleven thirty-three, by his estimate, and gods is he tired), that Nott finally slows down and stops at the entrance to a larger cavern.

This cavern is -

They are standing in the edge of an enormous geode, thick crystals in shades of white and blue and purple covering the walls. There’s the path that the worm took, across this cavern, that’s smoother out on the floor but otherwise, everything is colorful and sharp crystalline structures.

He scratches, absentmindedly, at his arms, and works with Caduceus to carve out a space for the night, Caduceus forming a shallow cave out of crystal and himself walking in slow circles to set up the dome.

At one point, Caduceus casts light, within the geode, and the entire room is dazzling and colorful and terrifying.

They aren’t any crystals he recognizes from his time bearing them within his arms. Just simple quartz, he believes. But - memories nonetheless, they are pretty.

He scoops up a handful and ignores how his hands are shaking.

He sets up the alarm spell as usual around the dome, and his friends all pack themselves inside, safe under his magic and safe together.

They tend to curl up, practically, when they have to sleep within the dome. Outside of it, they tend more to spread out and take space for themselves, but inside -

Beauregard and Jester sleep practically on top of each other, usually with Beau using Fjord as a pillow and Fjord sleeping back to back with Caduceus. Yasha sleeps on Jester’s other side, sometimes tangling limbs with Fjord as well, sometimes with Caduceus. He usually - physical contact, for him, is tenuous at the best of times, so most nights he sleeps with just Nott curled up into his side.

Sometimes, on - particularly bad nights, he sleeps alone, with only Frumpkin balanced precariously on his chest, and Nott joins Jester and Beauregard.

On worse nights, Beauregard joins him with Caduceus in tow, and he sleeps with nightmares but with people around to ground him when he wakes up screaming.

They aren’t sleeping yet, though.

He’s paging through his spellbook as the others settle around him, carefully checking over the spells he’s preparing for tomorrow - Polymorph and Banishment, first and foremost, Alarm and Mage Armor and Shield, Magic Missile, Fireball - when he hears Jester’s voice, clear and fake-joyful, as she casts sending to someone.

Her hands clasped around her holy symbol, her voice takes shape. “Hello! It’s Jester,” she sing-songs, “We’re bringing that dodecahedron with us. We’re on our way to -” she blanks, and then pokes Nott frantically, who whispers, “Xhorhas.”

Jester picks the spell back up. “Xhorhas.  Do you think it’s dangerous? Should we not? Please respond to this message.”

A split-second passes where Beauregard face palms and Fjord’s brow wrinkles.

“I think he’s cool with it.”

His friends slowly settle into sleep, around him, their daemons moving to the back of the hut and piling into each other. Daemons don’t need sleep, necessarily, but they sleep when their person’s do.

Frumpkin - though -

“Do you want me to keep watch?” His daemon’s tail lashes behind him, and he flexes his paws.

He nods, silently, and scratches him between the ears.

Frumpkin mrrps at him, and then treads out of the dome, settling in a loaf in front of the stonework Caduceus had created to disguise the arcane construct, eyes flashing in the dim light from Caduceus’s spell shining behind the crystals.

Sleep takes them.

Frumpkin, in the morning - morning is relative, because he knows that it’s nine in the morning but that means nothing with the lack of sunlight down here (and he’s glad that he still knows what time it is, still has some way of keeping track of what moments he’s living through and which moments he’s drifted through in emptiness) - but in the morning, Frumpkin informs him that nothing had transpired while they were sleeping, and together they set off once again.

The tunnels are monotonous and draining, just miles of rock and stone and dirt.

Eventually, a few hours later, they come across another larger chamber, with water dripping off stalactites and forming a pool in the center that Nott skitters nervously around, feet barely even touching the floor.

Fjord stares for a moment at the ceiling, and then unfurls the map that they have from Jester’s haversack.

“So, looks like we’re about here -” he traces one nubby claw around a large lake, “- roughly about twenty-four miles out from Felderwin.”

Nott and Beauregard fan out in the room the find the continuation of the worm’s tunnel.

He’s leaning against one of the rock formations, Frumpkin curled around his neck, and watching Jester whip out her paints with a fond look.

With practiced movements, she uses her normal paints to first paint a dick on one of the larger rock formations, and then with her magical paints forms a figure of her god, positioning it at the base of the penis with a few pamphlets tucked underneath.

When she glances back at him, smiling, there’s a fleck of pink paint under her left cheekbone.

The rock formation reads, “The Traveler is the tits! Follow him!”

Gods.

He’s busy watching Jester work on this temple idea when he hears Fjord yell, sharp and outraged, and as he whirls around, he watches his half-orc friend throw two blasts of eldritch energy at a pair of rock formations.

The energy dissipates across their surfaces, and he begins to yell out, “Fjord, are you alright?”, thinking that the madness of the tunnels had taken his friend so quickly, when he then sees the rocks shudder and then jolt, thick-skinned tentacles erupting from where they had previously been hidden and rocketing towards them.

In seconds, three of his party are captured and held within these creatures’ grasp, and he curses in Zemnian under his breath, because he can’t break out his larger spells with them so close -

The creature nearly bites Jester in half as she screams, ice crystallizing in the air around her, digging into the creature’s mouth and eyes, and it too lets out a gurgling shout.

From behind him, the other creature’s tentacle nearly takes him, but he shields just in time, the tentacle bouncing off of the arcane energy he creates. The second one, too bounced off the shield, and he thanks the gods under his breath for remembering to prepare that last night.

He watches as Caduceus is taken in by the tentacles, and then as he’s watching the firbolg’s mouth be covered by rock and slime another one takes him as well, drawing him in closer to the creature. It tries to bite him, and he whimpers, caught in his throat as the teeth deflect off his shield.

Frumpkin had slipped off his shoulders, at some point, and is hissing angrily on the other side of the chamber, Joeria near him and sprinting towards Beauregard, nearly at the edge of her range. But Tirley and Sprinkle and Clohria were not so lucky by far, and are all restrained alongside their people, tentacles pressing into their scales and fur.

Hopefully - hopefully these creatures are not - are not sentient. Gods, he hopes. He wouldn’t wish that - the violation of another person touching your soul without your willing it on any person.

He’s faced that, before.

(He’s glad Frumpkin’s range is non-existent, because it means his daemon can avoid everyone in this room.)

The teeth carve into him again, and nearly all his breath leaves his body as pain erupts across his chest. He can feel the blood already pooling under his shirt and trailing across his skin, and he lets out a shout while simultaneously smearing molasses from his waxed pocket and casting slow - and it takes, thank the Archeart, and the motions of his friends around them become less frantic.

After that point, he and his friends manage to escape and then dispatch the creatures from a distance, firing cantrips into them from a position above them.

Nott and Jester and Yasha dig out the loose rock behind them, Jester assuring them that it’s probably the worm hole, as Caduceus sits down and prays, gradually restoring lost vitality to their group.

And then, once again, they are off.

—

Hours and hours later, they stop for the night, once again settling into the carved stonework Caduceus creates and the dome that he traces out with careful steps.

Jester sends sending, once again, when they’re all pillowed on top of each other within the dome.

She sounds tired.

“It’s me again. Can you let us know if you’ve been on the move, or if you’re staying in the same place? Are you in the tunnels still?”

A moment’s pause.

Her face falls, and in the dark, she lays a hand on Nott’s shoulder.

“Shit,” she whispers. “He’s already in the city. We’re not going to be able to ambush them, you guys.”

A sigh, from somewhere in the Fjord-and-Caduceus-and-Yasha pile.

“We’ll - we’ll figure it out. There wasn’t much of an ambush we could do anyway. Well - we’ll be fine.” Fjord’s drawling accent is lighter, this late, and it’s a reminder that he still needs to ask him about that.

Not now though. Another time.

Frumpkin stands guard once again outside the dome.

Daemon’s sleep when their bondmates do, usually, but his daemon is no longer his bondmate, not really, not just that - he’s fey, now, half daemon and half familiar. He doesn’t sleep at all, anymore.

He doesn’t spot anything of note.

The next day is harder. It’s dark, still, dark and enclosed in this space, and he can feel restlessness rising at the back of his mind like the tide over rough sands the longer he spends trapped without the sun.

Jester, this day, spends hours singing, singing in Infernal, in Common, songs that he recognizes and joins along to - the beer song, the song she had made up about her mother - and songs he doesn’t. Caduceus sings, too, songs in Sylvan that he hums along to, sadness clinging in the back of his throat because he hasn’t heard anyone sing those since his parents -

He cuts off that thought before he can lead himself into darker thoughts and hums along.

An hour into this, into Jester and Caduceus’s impromptu jam session, he quietly says, “It’s two o’clock.”

Nott, immediately, without turning around or even moving her head, says, “Shut up.”

Another hour later.

“It’s three o’clock.”

“No.”

Caduceus sings through all of his songs in Sylvan and switches to Giant, a harsher tone that sounds more like Zemnian than anything else.

“It’s four o’clock,” he says, and Jester uses thaumaturgy to make chimes around them as Nott whips around, points, and says, “No!”

Jester uses sending again that night but receives only the knowledge that Yeza couldn’t respond.

He’s being watched. They know that now, at least.

They are clustered, once again, under the dome, Nott curled up on his lap and Fjord and Caduceus piled atop each other near them, Jester Beauregard and Yasha on the other side.

Fjord’s voice echoes in the small space as he glances towards Nott.

“Nott, I - we’re sorry.” He can hear Tirley’s quiet hiss from the daemon pile in the corner that his own daemon is once again absent from.

“I didn’t - I didn’t know that you had drowned. I shouldn’t have been making fun of your fear of water, regardless, but I didn’t know that, and I - I know how that feels, I’ve experienced that. You were brave.”

Nott’s claws prick slightly into his skin from the death grip she has on his shirt.

“You - you drowned.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

“It’s - that’s cool, don’t worry about it. We’re - we’re good?”

Nott moves herself off his lap and scuttles across the rough stone of the tunnel to where Fjord’s shoved himself into Caduceus and the wall.

She peers at him, eyes gleaming in the light of his dimmed driftglobe.

“You didn’t know, Fjord.”

“No but thank you all the same.”

Nott grins, lopsided. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t more helpful before, when I panicked and didn’t go into the water. But - it’s not so bad when I’m not alone.”

He senses that the serious part, the emotional part at least is winding down, and his own voice cuts across all their heads.

“It’s nine o’clock-” “Fuck you!”

They sleep.

Another morning waking up in the dark.

At least he knows what time it is.

Each time he says it, now, it’s evolved to Jester and Sprinkle doing off-key bell noises in front of him and Caduceus humming along, Beauregard twisting her arms to form clock hands, Nott groaning every single time without fail.

It’s three hours after waking that Beauregard, from the front, starts to rummage around in her bag, Joeria trotting alongside her.

“Hey, guys, if this is just going to be - another day of these fucking tunnels, I still have some of those mushroom drugs leftover from Mollymauk and Theo.”

Fjord eyes her. “I don’t think that’s -uh.”

Jester narrows hers. “What if there’s more cone head things, I don’t want to have to drag you through a fight while you’re tripping balls.”

Her expression lightens. “But, if you’re bored though, I have that smut book Caleb gave me!”

The next few hours, much to Fjord’s dismay and Caduceus’s confusion, are filled with Beau reading and then embellishing the lackluster writing of the book he had given Jester.

It’s at least a reprieve from Jester’s singing and the emptiness of this underground.

They stumble headfirst into a set of caverns under the control of some Kobolds, and make their acquaintance with Spurt and Millie, his less-than-creatively named daemon, a giant millipede that immediately freaks Fjord out.

Spurt and Millie, though, die under the weight of the giant’s warhammer.

They make the sprint across the lava magically assisted, in some cases, and just plain sprinting in others.

Daemons are carried in other daemon’s mouths or just placed on shoulders and around necks, and most of them make the sprint over unscathed -

Except for Nott, who nearly drowns and burns in lava while he watches, Cobal fluttering and screeching a foot off of the surface of the lava, feathers singeing at the edges.

Beauregard saves her, and they run, but the instant they stop he’s on his knees, vision graying out on the edges, hands frantically pulling out his spare bandages and attempting to fix the burns on his best friends arms while Frumpkin’s licking at Cobal’s feathers.

Jester shoves him back after a second, Sprinkle snarling lightly. “Caleb, just - here.” She gently places her hands on Nott’s, and with a flow of divine energy the burns start to heal over, blistered skin receding to redness - and then, as Caduceus prays, to smooth unscarred skin.

He’s -

She could have burned.

He’s glad that they aren’t going to scar.

Burn scars are a bitch to deal with.

They sit, for a few minutes, while Caduceus hums and prays to the Wildmother under his breath, and Beauregard pokes him hard in the shoulder.

“Dude, can I borrow some arm wraps? Mine got fucking evaporated.” She holds up her arms and twists them in the faint light from Caduceus’s staff, the burn marks slowly fading as the firbolg continues to pray.

“ _Ja_ -” he pulls some out of his satchel, and Beauregard takes them and starts rewrapping her arms. Across from them, Jester wrinkles her nose from her position next to Nott. “Aren’t they all stinky though? You shouldn’t wear stinky arm wraps, Beau.”

Frumpkin huffs, from around his neck, and he mock glares in her direction. “I’ve known you for months, now, Jester, do I truly still smell? Truly?”

She shrugs. “Your hands get stinky, like all vinegary and sweaty.”

“Those were just in my bag, they’re clean.”

She winks at him. “See! All good.”

They bed down for the night a few more hours of limping along later, Jester casting sending yet again. They only discover that there are three people guarding him.

It’s not as reassuring as his friends probably want it to be. If it’s only three, watching such a high priority prisoner - they are either highly skilled, the watchers, or he is sequestered in a location that the Krynn feel secure in knowing that he’s not at risk of being found or of escaping.

While the rest of them sleep, Fjord takes watch.

He wakes up three hours later, to the shifting sound of Jester’s jewelry as she wakes, and he forces himself up, watching outside the dome with his tiefling friend.

They sit together in silence for a few minutes, until Fjord’s breathing has settled back into a sleeping rhythm from where he’s curled himself into Caduceus and Yasha.

Sprinkle curls around the front of her cloak.

“Does it bother you, when I talk about you smelling? If it’s bothering you, I’ll stop.”

He glances over, and her eyes are locked on the wall of the tunnel, tracing out invisible curlicues.

“It did in the beginning, maybe, but - we are friends now. You can keep the bit going, I don’t mind.”

She pinches her nose shut and grimaces exaggeratedly, and he huffs out a laugh. 

“You were probably right, though, about the bandages getting sweaty. It was - pretty warm back there, _ja_?”

With steady fingers that he’s willing to be still, he takes off the bandages and then slides his gloves back on, arms and scars visible in the dim light.

When he looks up, Jester’s smiling at him, a sad and hopeful thing.

The rest of their watch is unremarkable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spurt/Millie: a giant millipede. Naming creativity wasn't his strong point.


	6. Xhorhas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A climb, a battle, and a journey.

The tunnel, as they continue to walk, and walk, and walk - it is monotonous, these grooved walls, carved by something that he knew exist but… the sheer scale of it makes the walls seem less and less like stone and more like he’s walking through the throat of something massive, something that is waiting for he and his friends to arrive at the end of it so that it can make a meal out of them.

There’s a metaphor somewhere in that. Probably.

But the walls are merely stone. Carved organically, but stone nonetheless, and he stumbles on.

Eventually, the walls start to narrow and then start to sloping upwards, until they eventually stop at the base of a near vertical cliff, walking no longer an option.

“Right, then,” Fjord sighs, and they loiter around as everyone starts to pull out rope, chalking hands - well, only Beau does that, and he shudders to think how old that chalk is (hypocritical of him, given the bat shit he has lining his coat pockets, but he - it’s quality bat guano) and preparing to climb.

It’s nerve wracking, climbing in a line with six other people, and he spends most of the trip after the first incident murmuring the verbal component of feather fall under his breath, mind locked on the pouch that he keeps his feathers in. He probably, if he times it right, has enough of a chance to catch any one of them before they hit the craggy ground beneath the cliff to make it worth keeping the words fresh on his lips.

The climb is made more difficult by the fact that they have their daemons with them. Most of the larger ones - Beauregard’s coyote, Yasha’s fox - are tied to their pairs with rope and dragged upwards - Nugget included in that, tied close to Yasha, as the strongest one, the dog slobbering happily - while the smaller ones cling to their people’s shoulders, tucked away in folds of fabric. His own - he whispers a quick apology, and snaps Frumpkin to the feywild.

He hates having to do that, but it’s better than having to watch his daemon plummet and shatter against the rocks below.

At the top, Caduceus and Yasha creep up and peer through the faint light to the sky outside. Whatever they see, they deem it safe enough to proceed, and he follows them out of the tunnel, and, for the first time in days, back under the gray light of the clouded sky.

Yasha unties Vrokin from the rope keeping her at her side, and stares out over the plains.

She looks - lost, almost. Sad in a way he can’t pinpoint.

“This what you are used to, _ja_?” He starts, hesitantly, gesturing out at the expanse.

She sighs, and nods her head to the south. “Sort of? I’m not from here, specifically, but these are the wastes.”

Wastes is certainly a term for it. There’s almost nothing but cracked badlands, faint scrappy bushes and town grayish yellow wild grasses dying in the sun, a few scraggly trees and a river just in the faint horizon. It’s foggy, too, in a way - his visibility is limited.

Hesitantly, he places a hand on her shoulder. “Regardless, you might be our guide, here.”

He takes his hand back, before she responds, but she nods at him absently, eyes tracking one of the larger beasts roaming the badlands, just barely visible in the fog.

He snaps Frumpkin back around his neck, and scans the expanse again, more specifically, for sign of the worm’s path that they have been following so far.

He finds nothing.

It is not - unsurprising, but it throws a rock in the wheel of their plans.

The mountain side around them is gray and silent. He can spot a few vultures - or some other large bird of prey, judging from the wingspan - circling a few thousand feet away, on some other cove in the mountain side, but they are dwarfed by distance and in comparison to the stone outcroppings surrounding them. Monoliths raise up around them, some twenty, fifteen feet high - carved by wind and rain in a way that they almost look like a children’s block tower. Like a mountainside built by giants. If he squints, he can see through the fog to a break in the mountains - and that break orients him enough to realize that it’s the Ashguard Garrison, that should be in this valley, just visible from this side of the Ashkeeper Peaks. But when he tries to spot the buildings of the Garrison - he had seen diagrams of it, with Trent - preparations for a mission he had never gone on - there are no buildings visible.

Just a mass of darkness, misplaced against the stone of the peaks.

They’ve heard, already, that Ghor Dranas is engulfed in perpetual night. But that city, that seat of this Dynasty - it makes sense for a city of drow to be dark. The fact that this darkness, seems to be spreading, out towards the battlefields - out towards the empire - that, he thinks, is concerning, and Frumpkin nudges his whiskers against the stubbly hair on the bottom of his chin.

He stares, at the distance, for a long moment, considering. If the dynasty has already taken that Garrison - and they very well might have, at this point - there are civilian cities not that far away, cities of innocents just sitting in their path -

His thoughts are interrupted as he whirls around at the sound of Caduceus casting, his furred hand pointed towards a gray-cloaked figure that’s emerged from one of the pile of stones above them, hooded, with their hand up, a daemon he pins as a bird but has no further detail about perched on his head.

Fjord grimaces, in his peripheral vision, and in an instant is gone in a wash of mist, appearing directly before the figure.

He can just see, through the mist, that Fjord has his sword out, pointed at them, at their throat, and he stills a flinch as he prepares for the spray of blood, for the battle about to come.

But Fjord says something, inaudible at this distance, and the figure raises their hood. A human, armored in colors that he can now recognize as Empire armaments, and he can feel the energy of his companions around him take on a different air.

A better option, for their continued survival, than Dynasty soldiers, but still -

They are civilians, in legal terms, here on enemy lands. It isn’t the greatest look for them. (Well. He is not a civilian, and neither is Beauregard, and Jester and Fjord and Caduceus aren’t even empire citizens, and he isn’t sure if Nott is counted as a citizen anymore since she’s legally dead, but that’s semantics and he needs to concentrate.)

There’s a whistle, from the figure, and around and above them other gray-cloaked figures move away from the rocks and into visibility.

Surrounded, then.

 _Wunderbar_.

Fjord gestures at them, saying something again, and then makes a follow me hand movement - they follow him and the soldier away from the openness of the sky, to an alcove that grants a bit of cover. The man scowls at them, and glances at Fjord.

“Alrright, so I’m Kaulden, this is Ditty -” he nods his head, and the warbler gives out a soft trill, “- I’m the captain of the Muck Men. We’re a group of scouts and rangers, up from Bladegarden. We scout out here, keep an eye on the enemy. Y’all do realize this is a war zone. You know that, right?”

He narrows his eyes, and Caleb tries to force his face into some semblance of trustworthiness, Frumpkin twitching his whiskers from his position around his neck.

Jester glares right back. “We didn’t have a choice.”

Fjord rests his hand on her shoulder, and steps in, closer. “We are far from home. A rescue party, nothing more. Necessity brought us out here.” He’s angling for sympathy, in his voice, but it has the desired reaction.

Kaulden’s face relaxes, somewhat, and the man drags a hand down his face. “This - whoever you’re rescuing, whereabouts are they?”

Fjord gives a half shrug, and Jester says, under her breath, “We think Ghor Dranas?”

Sprinkle moves around her neck to her shoulder and then up to curl around her horns, the soft tinkling on her charms at the movement resonating in the small alcove.

“Did you happen to see any higher-echelon-looking mages, wizard folk, come through? With a big worm, purple, real big?” Beauregard’s voice cuts through Kaulden’s incredulous scoff, and the man hardens, glancing at her with suspicion.

“Yeah, we’ve seen a worm. Trudged through, straight east, ‘cross the plains. What the hell are you dealing with Crick wizards for?”

Fjord steps in, again, and says, in that same tone, “A good friend of ours got swept up in the attack on Felderwin, little bit ago. The most we know is that he was taken with them when they left. We aren’t leaving him out here to die, at least not alone.”

Bleak, but it gets Kaulden to soften.

They learn, from him, the the Ashguard Garrison has been taken by the Krynn, the Rockgaurd Garrison under attack. For right now, it’s quiet, but the quiet is making the Empire nervous after months of repeated attempts of invasion.

Kaulden worries - he can read him, at least somewhat, but he’s worried that this is the calm before the storm.

A short conversation later - mostly trying to warn them away from this mission, that they are on, but it’s much to late to turn back now, not for Nott’s husband, her life - Kaulden steps out, amongst his men, and makes a sharp gesture -

And then a sharper one, as he falls to the ground, arrow protruding from his chest. The dissolving of his daemon into golden fragments that dissolve into the air around them is just visible before Caleb ducks back, pressed against the wall of the alcove, and listens with growing horror as arrows and bolts splinter against bodies and rocks outside, the pinging noise of metal arrowheads grating against his ears.

Outside of the alcove, a familiar sound that reminds him of fire, burning - Jester, near him, softly swears, and he agrees in the sentiments.

The chattering growls of Gnolls are loud in the wind howling around them, and as he watches - eyes wide, Frumpkin near growling against his neck - Nott and Cobal vanish from view, and he can feel her cloak brush against her side as she rushes out.

There’s a streak of energy, brilliant and purplish black that collides with rocks out of view with a crash.

Gnolls, _and_ mages - gnoll mages? That doesn’t make too much sense, with the kind of energy being flung around, but the alternative is -

He sees, on the edges of his vision, the curling black chitinous armor of a Krynn soldier, doubled in shadows, strike down one of the scouts from behind.

This is a Dynasty attack, then.

And they are right in the thick of it.

He has the construct of the ziggurat in his hands before he even realizes what he’s doing, and the verbal component of Tongues murmured under his breath a moment later.

On the edge of his vision, again, another Krynn soldier, this one less armored - his mind thinks mage, and then enemy in quick succession - and he watches with the spell sitting in his mouth as the mage raises a hand and gold energy condenses into a line, and then he keeps watching, terrified, as a group of the Muck Men are drawn in by the energy, daemons seemingly pulled along in front of them, until two of them collide mid air and dissolve into golden dust that fades to air.

That spell -

One of them managed to dig his heels in and is clutching his daemon frantically, blood pooling underneath his nose as he stares at the lifeless forms of his fellow soldiers where daemons used to reside.

Astrologically based. _Daemon_ based -

If that gets them - his friends -

He doesn’t know if  his daemon bond is solid enough to be manipulated on this plane. Or if Nott’s is, or Caduceus’s. But the rest of them -

All of them are in danger here.

He can’t let that happen.

His group, around him, shifts. Jester and Caduceus raise their hands nearly in unison, and he feels the crackle of divine energy that settles along the cracks in his soul as the blessings of the Wildmother and the Traveler come down upon their little group.

From beside him, he heards Joeria start to growl, hears Vrokin’s yip as Yasha’s eyes go dark, and the fight begins.

 

The fight lasts for maybe two minutes, but as fights often do, it feels like an eternity of turmoil contained within that span, blood and death and dust spreading and choking the air around him as he prepares spell after spell, desperately grabbing for components. He smears phosphorus and sulfur and guano across his palms.

His fire divides the battlegrounds, to try and keep his own companions safe, and he spends valuable energy countering an attempt to counter his own spell. He needs - the fire is something he hates, sometimes, but it’s part of him, and right now he needs it, needs that burning taste of smoke at the back of his throat to keep his friends safe.

Around him, the empire soldiers they had so carelessly found die in droves, daemon dust filling the air with gold before their souls depart from this plane.

He and Fjord make panicked eye contact as he feels the faintest bit of tugging - no pain, not exactly, but something feels wrong, for a moment, but it has much more of a pronounced effect on Fjord, as Tirley goes slipping from his shoulders and flung five, ten feet away, Fjord crying out in shock and pain, scrabbling after her soon after.

Jester goes down, for one terrifying moment, blood dripping from her mouth and Sprinkle barely conscious around one of her horns, but the mage and Krynn soldier disappear from sight with the arcane energy of a teleportation spell, and they are left in silence amongst the bodies - well, almost silence, just the demon still frothing at the mouth as it starts to turn on them, dripping gnoll viscera still tangled amongst it’s mouth.

It takes just another handful of seconds to dispatch that as well.

Out of the band that had been there before, the only people left alive are his party and three of the Muck Men.

Not a good sign of things to come. Astrologically based spells, based fighting - this is the power that the letter references, he thinks with dawning horror. The letter in felderwin - the Krynn have some deeper connection to the astral plane, to dust, a connection that the Assembly was trying to use Yeza to explore, that the Krynn presumably took him for. Not a good sign, at all, there’s only so much they can fight, they are only people - gods, what are they doing, he thinks wildly, before he feels the divine energy of the blessing trickle out of him and he refocuses on the situation.

The remaining gray-cloaked soldiers silently start to pick through the bodies, laying them in an even line, taking mementos and supplies from bloodied pockets. Beauregard slowly and silently starts helping them, still cradling her ribs where a stray blow had glanced her, and together they pull what they can from them, folding their arms crossed over still chests and sliding their eyelids shut. He goes over, to the one nearest him, and helps as much as he can.

As much as he can turns out to not be very much, and he turns abruptly to sit on the rocks, sliding down still he’s lying, staring up at the gray sky. Frumpkin curls up on his chest, and he tries to breathe.

The three soldiers left walk away, eventually, a note from Beauregard to - Dairon, he thinks, the name faintly familiar - in hand, after letting them take a few of the blended gray cloaks and the rations they don’t need. They bow their heads, in remembrance, but he can tell by the set of their faces that this may not be the worse that they’ve seen out here. May not be the worse that they will deal with, not yet.

They sit around for almost an hour, on the cold rocks, as the sky starts to dim slowly with the stirrings of a storm. He sinks his hands into Frumpkin’s fur and shivers against the biting wind, watching as Caduceus prays and blesses them with a sliver of warmth that seeps into his bones. Nott, with Cobal on her shoulders, gazes into the dodecahedron - the beacon, or a beacon, he thinks, quietly - her eyes glazing over gold, for a moment, reaching into the bag and pulling out the alethiometer a moment later. With the haze of dust still clinging to her eyes, she sits on the ground and twists thin fingers around the dials of the device, the hands twitching and then dancing around the symbols. She stares at it, for a long moment, and then nods, decisively, and tucks it away again.

“He’s still in Ghor Dranas. Yeza, I mean.” Cobal croaks in agreement on her shoulder, and she flicks her fingers against the rocks. “Should we - it’s going to get dark, eventually. Should we get going?”

Nott slips her hand into his own as Caduceus sets the mound of bodies ablaze, and he holds hers and tries not to let the smell of burning flesh overwhelm him. The climb down the slope of the mountain is easier, at least, than the climb up through the tunnel, through it still takes a few hours before they reach where the grass starts to peak through more than the rock.

Caduceus thankfully has an eye for nature that he lacks, and he and Clohria see what he could not, tracing out the path of the worm that they follow for the next bit of time before dark starts to fall.

An endless trek east awaits them, on this journey.

He sets up the dome, when night starts to fall, and Jester lines the exterior with a glyph of warding. They take turns, watching, that night, but see nothing.

The morning dawns bright and cold, with frost spreading in icy waves across the scrublands. It reminds him of home, almost. The dead brown grass of winter, covered in a thick blanket of ice.

It’s not, technically, but this feels the farthest from home he’s ever been.

They walk for hours before resting for lunch, but other than the walking, nothing happens. Boring, in the extreme - he’s spent so much time walking, with this group, but they can’t even fall into their usual conversations and humming and singing and _noise,_ any noise, too paranoid about being seen in this exposed plain. Rightfully paranoid, he thinks bitterly, but boring all the same.

Slowly, the river in the distance grows wider as it comes into view.

Four hours and a bit - twenty two minutes exactly, he knows, but a bit suffices - of walking later, Nott stops at the front of the group, ears pricking towards the distance. He can hear, just barely, the chatter of some goblinoid tongue - one he assumes she understands, because her face is falling drastically.

She listens, and then looks up.

“Get down,” she hisses, and he follows her gaze only to blanch at the roc starting to blot out the sun above them, a massive wingspan growing and growing beyond comprehension as it starts to circle in the air.

Vaguely, from his new position on the ground, he sees it pick off one of the bugbears in the distance.

Fjord’s hands twist, and a roaring, massive furred creature comes rippling into existence and charging away from them. As they hunker down on the ground, Nott’s own silent one joins it, and they hide under cloaks, pressed against the dirt, watching as the roc circles, and circles, and circles -

He can hear Beauregard praying in a quiet whisper behind him.

The roc eventually departs, two beings from somewhere near to them clutched in its claws, and he lets out a bone-deep sigh of relief.

They find Gluzo, the  remaining bugbear, a short distance away, still playing dead, but after food and an offer of gold, he leads them across the wastes to the river, squirrel daemon that nearly reminds him of Twiggy wrapped in a furred circle around his neck. It’s only another three hours of walking, but he can feel the exhaustion of the travel start to tug at his bones again. He’s not built for this, for mucking it through these fields. None of them are, really, but - well, maybe Yasha, he muses, glancing to her.

She and Vrokin look - distant. He should talk to her, later -

Probably easier to try and nudge Fjord or Beau to do it.

The river itself is vast, deep in the middle and with a rushing current that he shivers to think about swimming through, half-veiled memories of swimming lessons in the calm creeks of Blumenthal paling in comparison to the rapids in front of him.

But Nott - the brave - he thinks fondly, runs across the river with a rope to get them to the other side, Cobal flapping alongside her, feathers glinting in the low light of the setting sun. She waves, from the other side, and he holds tight to the rope, Gluzo swimming across skillfully to join her and hold the twine steady.

And Fjord - the mostly inconsiderate, he thinks less fondly, twists his palm and cuts the river in two, Uk’otoa’s gift holding the water at bay.

He still holds the rope as he walks across, and is rewarded with a faint laugh from Nott, from the hundreds of feet across the muddy bottom of the river. A token of appreciation, for her risking that fear of the water to guide them across safely.

Beauregard’s daemon makes the outline of paws in the muck as they make their way across.

Caduceus, at one point, pockets full of river stones that he’s been picking up along the way, sticks his head directly into the wall of water Fjord’s holding back.

He emerges, a moment later, drenched from the neck up and grinning brightly. Probably saw some weird river fish, if he had to guess.

He rolls his eyes and turns back towards Nott, his lips twitching when he hears Clohria shake herself on top of Caduceus’s piled hair, water flying out and striking him in the back of the head.

Fjord drops the water once they make it to the other side, and they end up standing around on the riverbank as the water rushes below them, daemons starting to move in closer to each other the longer they stand without moving.

After a talk with Gluzo -

They decide to make their way to the city, he had mentioned, Assarius - this City of Beasts. Try and disguise themselves, so as to fit in. Try to get horses, or oxen - something to shorten the two weeks travel Gluzo explains Ghor Dranas is away.

So many things they are trying, he thinks, uncomfortable with the uncertaintly.

But really, that’s all this life is anymore, isn’t it, so he should just force his brain to stop worrying.

(He wishes it was that easy.)

A few hours of travel later, they settle for the night again, and he traces out a space for the dome with even steps, eventually giving in mentally and allowing Gluzo to sleep inside the boundary of the spell. Gluzo is -

Strange, in a sense, in that he’s never met a bugbear before, but he’s considerate enough, considering how strange they must be to him, and his daemon, while silent so far, has been chasing Sprinkle in playing tag around the dome for almost thirty minutes by the time they’re all settled, so he can’t be all bad.

Jester gives him a tattoo.

Sometimes - sometimes he thinks, about what rumors there are of his party, of his friends - mercenaries, pirates, traitors. People who make friends, who add members into their ranks, and then leave them again hours or days later, mostly to never be seen again. A party of completely different people, who have still stuck it out this long. People who force or give tattoos to those they deem worthy.

Confusing, probably, the lot of them.

With daemons curled together on one side, those seeking comfort on the other, himself and Beauregard and Fjord carved out in their own personal spaces, they sleep.

—

The city is massive, as they approach the next morning.

Not the largest that he’s seen, not by any means, but there’s buildings and entire neighborhoods stacked vertically atop each other, on the backs of other buildings and turtle shells alike. It’s a mass of goblins and bugbears and hobgoblins, kobolds and other races all streaming through the streets, living their lives. He spots daemons of all kinds - psuedodragons that are so rare in the empire seem almost common here, lizards and birds and snakes even more common, even a few minor elementals that he can spot accompanying some of the more varied inhabitants.

Their disguises seem to hold up. He hadn’t been sure, this morning, what to do about Beauregard, but his - unconventional, perhaps, but still functional use of polymorph seems to be doing it for the time being.

It’s a lot of magic to use, this early, but he needs her to be safe, and a human in these lands -

They will face that scrutiny later, when their magics wear out, but scrutiny he’s sure it will be.

There are some humans here, yes. But those that are here, they’re dirtied, daemons encrusted with dirt and muck, wolves and bears and larger things, fierce things, predators. Otherwise, they’re guarded - Krynn guards of their own gathered around them, larger daemons cloaked in protective armor and clothing, matching the chitinous exterior of the armor of the guards.

His own daemon curls around his shoulders, and he and the Nein walk on.

Gluzo had told them yesterday that the journey to Ghor Dranas was two weeks or more, probably slower for them on foot - if they can’t find mounts, or another way there, they’re going to be stuck in place. Two weeks is a long time to leave Yeza in captivity, a long time to try and survive in these plains, a long time for Nott to panic over her captured husband.

They need to find a way to shorten that time.

And hopefully, somewhere in this city, is a way to do that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so! i'm not dead, and neither is this fic! I can't promise how fast updates will be, but I'm hoping to keep churning them out like high-quality butter.  
> As of 1/30/2020, all chapters of this fic have been edited and updated. It's worth it to go back and reread, trust me, but if you can't,nothing should be confusing. If anything is, like always, shoot me a comment!  
> In fact, please, comment! Comment a thousand times! I will enjoy it immensely.

**Author's Note:**

> Daemons:  
> Caleb - Frumpkin (bengal cat)  
> Nott - Cobal (crow)  
> Fjord - Tirley (coral snake)  
> Jester - Sprictis/Sprinkle (crimson weasel)  
> Beau - Joeria/Jo (coyote)  
> Yasha - Vrokin (black arctic fox)  
> Caduceus - Clohria (giant flying squirrel, albino)  
> Marion Lavorre - Xerophia (black leopard)  
> Yussah Errenis - Shione (wolf)  
> Wentworth - Astra (malagasy painted toad)  
> Bryce - Lenora (red winged blackbird)


End file.
